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Official User Research: We want to understand your thoughts on UI features

Discussion in 'UGUI & TextMesh Pro' started by rossb_unity, May 17, 2021.

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  1. rossb_unity

    rossb_unity

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Nov 15, 2018
    Posts:
    26
    Thank you for offering to take part in this survey!

    We are looking to understand your needs for UI creation tools. Your participation in this survey will help us identify what features are most important to you.

    This survey is broken into two parts. The first part consists of 7 multiple choice questions on demographics. The second part is a series of 21 multiple choice questions on UI features. This survey has typically taken participants between 15-20 minutes.

    Thank you for helping to improve Unity!

    Survey Link
     
  2. zombiegorilla

    zombiegorilla

    Moderator

    Joined:
    May 8, 2012
    Posts:
    9,042
    The wording on the feature questions is unclear I think, at least in terms of maybe getting accurate information. You ask if you "could" do something how would you feel, then if you "could not" do something how would you feel. (localization, sounds, shaders/mats, etc). I think you are actually asking how you feel if they were "built in".

    Practically speaking, I can and do use all those things now, and have for many years. If I were somehow prevented from doing those things, I wouldn't be using unity. Are you planning on trying to prevent users from adding sounds to events? I am assuming not, but since virtually every unity game has UI sound events, the wording is a bit nonsensical. .
     
    rossb_unity and Hosnkobf like this.
  3. Rib

    Rib

    Joined:
    Nov 7, 2013
    Posts:
    39
    yeah I just came back to say the same thing, sorry - the wording of these questions seems like it's going to give really unreliable answers. It feels like there are a bunch of double negatives going on here and I actually don't know if they were intentional and so I don't know how to answer accordingly.

    I'm also not sure I can relate to the way some of them are phrased. Like finding UI features within 10 seconds - obviously if I need a UI feature I want it to be discoverable as quickly as possible - same as for any feature. It sounds like you want to know which are the important features to prioritize making them discoverable but surely anyone answering a survey about UI features is just going to say 'yeah I want UI features to be easily discoverable' :)

    Similarly for the masks - if you need to mask something you need masks... so I'm not sure how to rank that - sometimes I need masks :p. If you want to potentially drop or limit the masking capabilities due to some trade offs maybe you could ask some kind of 'what if masks could only be rectangular' (just guessing that you wish you didn't have to support generic stencil buffer/bitmap based masks). Without some form of mask then how would you support any kind of viewport - so surely at least rectangular/scissor masks are essential?

    I'm now on guard with the questions about game objects vs ui description language. I see that it's kind of asking the same question three times but I'm unsure now how these are going to be interpreted since they aren't exactly opposites. Personally I value being able to create UI interactively in the scene so I can see how it's going to look in context and in game. I have lots of world space UI which I'd like to be able to see in edit mode within a scene I'm building. I create lots of prefabs for composable UI elements that get cached/pooled and reused for dynamic content. Having a seperate UI description mark up might be OK so long as things can always be previewed in 3d in the editor and it's easy to compose UI at runtime too. It's tricky to answer the questions in the questionnaire because they feel really loaded without any kind of explanation for them. Like "How important is having a UI composed of game objects?"... I mean I don't technically care about game objects per se' (I care more about the convenience of the workflow) but I think with the context of this question I should be answering 7. I guess this isn't trying to figure out a trade off with DOTS? It's trying to figure out a trade off with designing UI via a separate markup? Potentially having a seperate UI markup would even be good but the questions aren't trying to understand how I use the UI system, it's asking me to choose a technical approach without enough context - I don't know how it would work in practice to know if it would fit my current use cases so it's hard to have a strong opinion (besides wanting to keep the current approach which works for me).

    There's a choice overload here and the phrasing of the choices doesn't seem like a simple scale that aligns with the questions :/ "If you could diagnose style and layout property problems in a dedicated window, how would you feel?" that sounds kinda cool yeah. I've been putting neutral everywhere because I don't now how to map the other options to my general feeling.

    Sorry for all the follow up notes. Tbh though I feel like I struggled with answering that questionnaire.
     
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  4. Rib

    Rib

    Joined:
    Nov 7, 2013
    Posts:
    39
    Just for reference here, since this was one of the reasons I wanted to answer that questionnaire (I thought it might ask for some general feedback) I was hoping to get a chance to plead the case for this issue to be reevaluated:

    https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...ts-in-the-scene-view-when-gizmos-are-disabled

    Since I finally switched over from 2019.4 to Unity 2020.3 yesterday I was reminded that the first time I tried it I spent ages wondering why I couldn't modify any UI elements in my game and only figured it out after googling for it thinking there was a bug and finding that 'won't fix' issue. It feels like the issue got dismissed quite quickly based on a technical detail instead of considering the user experience regression that's been introduced here and considering how that's making things more awkward for any developers that have lots of world space UI that they work with.

    There's also this forum thread about the same issue:
    https://forum.unity.com/threads/cant-select-ui-elements-through-scene-without-enabled-gizmos.984792

    and this thread also showing some confusion with the current design: https://forum.unity.com/threads/cant-see-anchors-on-ui.435197/
     
    Last edited: Jun 24, 2021
    rossb_unity likes this.
  5. april_4_short

    april_4_short

    Joined:
    Jul 19, 2021
    Posts:
    489
    Please fix the inability to select and move UI elements without Gizmos on. This is such a bad choice of user experience of regression no amount of asking about thoughts will generate what you want until you fix this.

    I'll add another reason this problematic... for those of us with lots of things in our scenes, the gizmos get very crowded.

    There's already layered selection and selection blocking filtering. Not sure why this regression was added. Please fix!
     
    rossb_unity likes this.
  6. rossb_unity

    rossb_unity

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Nov 15, 2018
    Posts:
    26
    Thank you for your replies. I have added your comments to areas we need to investigate. This study is complete. Thank you for your valuable time and input
     
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