New Idea for a better UI

[Sir Rogers]

Ok, sure the current design is ok and looks a bit like IRC, but I believe that it won't scale with increasing numbers. And I don't want to go down the GARENA style road, well maybe I could, to steal all your moneyz!

Anyway, here's the idea. I'd really appreciate some feedback if the either is possibly too functional, and possibly confusing too, or if it's nice, or whatnot. Just your opinion about the idea or possible suggestions on how to make it better.

Well imagine you have 800 users in one chatroom ... First of all the "xxx joined the chatroom" will kill your CPU, and then listing and ordering all players in alphanumerical order in the users list will burn your motherboard to the ground. Yes!

The point is that a UI which lists ALL players in a channel with no limited number of user, does not scale well. People with poorer PCs will start to see lag if they're ingame, and that wouldn't be good. So we need a new UI, or rather a new approach to the UI.

Let's think about this. Why do you need to see 800 users in a list? Let's assume you only know 5 people in that list, and 5 people in the list are admins/moderators. We can safely assume that you are chatting to 3 other people on some random topic. That means you only need to see 13/800 people on that list, really. So the basic approach is to not display any users in the list unless they are of possible importance to you. Let's break that down into bullet points of suggestions:

1) The UI doesn't display any users in the userlist to start with. It only shows you the total number of users that are present in the chatroom.
2) It will display your friends that join the chatroom.
3) It will display admins / moderators / etc ...
4) It will display people that are active in the chat. People that you might be chatting with. So if someone tpyes a message, he pops up in your userlist, and then if that person is quiet for X (maybe, 5) minutes, he disappears again from your userlist.
5) You only see the message "xxx left the chatroom" for people that were in your userlist. Maybe the same for the "xxx joined the chatoom" for people that are future entries in your list (friends, admins, etc...)

Those are the points for the initial suggestion. But what now if you want to find a user in the list? I suggest that there be a textfield on top of the userlist, where upon entering a name, it would display you all the users which match your search pattern. Example:

You type "al" and the userlist will display "mental", "alfred", "al_capone", "dental_floss".
I think that the users which were found this way should be displayed in a separate category, I'm not sure yet how that should look like graphically, it's just the idea for now.

And that's all. I'm really looking forward to your feedback guys.


Regards,
Sir Rogers

[squalliram]

imo i like the user searching part that you mentioned in the end...but i would say you can surely remove the "xxx has joined the conversation" as it doesnt really matter that much...coz if we really want to search for someone, we can just search using the search box...!!!

[Artan]

i suggest,

1)
create channel like starting page, where you receive news, info and stuff like that.

[FAQ]: http://www.mymgn.com/board/showthrea...708#post164708
[Tutorial]: http://www.mymgn.com/board/showthread.php?p=160157
[Facebook Page]: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ranked...09948679031029
[Download] http://www.mymgn.com/board/downloads.php?do=file&id=11

etc.

2)
create notification box
box to receive notification for events, such as, friends login, logout, game created, game started, game ended...

3) definitely remove full user list and that "joined the chatroom"

users list - just create list like this with max 20 items (or more). last item is "..."
and above it a auto complete text field that will purge the users that match the expression from the text field.

admins have most priority, friends have priority also.
also i would add buttons "admins" "friends" "all" so you can further purge the list.

Facebook and Google use this and it works like a charm for them.

4) i would ask jenny if she wants to be my girlfriend

5) i would split the left tree list and add the friend list there also.

6) damn, i would create tool bar, status bar, notification area, chat rooms, starting page

7) i would fix emoticons on this WYSIWYG editor

8) maybe i should ask jenny if she only wants to have sex

9) i would add option to download maps directly from the RGC

10) i would forgive Tain for going offtopic