When will new Unity UI be available?

Unity is not even close at being as complex as those software (UI Wise). Continues UX improvements are as important as continues refactoring and other continues improvements to make software better over time.

edit And I dont like your tone young man

 

Then mind your walking stick.

 

I just want the general flow of making editor extensions to be streamlined and it looks like Unity is putting a lot of work into that from a lot of different angles and that's honestly good enough for me.

 

It came from concept of unification. That means, having same looking application on both mobile and PC. You should really read about implementation new of user interface for skype (M$), and mass of complains since then (along with other changes.

According to alexa.com popularity down trend continue from over year now. Y axis represents ranking, lower the better.



That was when old skype and its interface has been depreciated. So users were forced to use new ugly inefficient GUI. However, similar approach seams works well for discord.

New trend with UI and its front end, just don't fit to every application. Often wastes so much space. Making application none ergonomic to users.

If anybody wants specific design, which can not, or is hard to achieve HTML based like, devs can use embedded browsers it Unity made app, to run web based GUI. From there, you can make any kind of GUI you like, using for example HTML5.

 

Link?
But exactly so, it is lazy/price-saving option of same design across all, which means desktop loses out. So new skype is using windows-store/UWP and has no clear-type/sub-pixel text rendering on Windows and mobile-style hidden menu.

 

Sorry, no particular link. It is just knowledge gathered from years of experience of Windows OS, reviewed number of sources, discussions and articles. It could be perhaps a bit challenging, to find original M$ report. But there is ton of articles (official and not) on the topic.

This is exactly what I have on my mind.

In fact I avoid win 10, when I can. One of many reasons, is ergonomic, which is less than wind 7. Many simple tasks required me to do extra click, to do same what I had on win 7.

I was become too frustrated and dumped it.

 

Speaking of poor analogies, citing Maya as an example for how to develop a cohesive, usable UI?

Prior to UX I was a 3D VFX animator for 20 years, 13 of those as a freelancer. I watched and used *a lot* of high end 3D and Compositing software evolve over that time and worked at dozens of studios. The most usable of them in the 3D realm was SoftImage.

Maya, when I had to use it, just sucked. This was backed up by the number of Maya users who at one point or another had to use SoftImage. I never heard anyone say, "this is terrible to use, Maya is way better". It was always the opposite, they were a little shocked by how much easier Soft was to use and navigate... And then Autodesk killed it. Meh.

 

Thanks for the insight. I know it was an attempt to unify the UI, however they made it impossible to revert, which I have a hard time believing didn't come up when they were testing. If I had to guess the decision was more of a financial one. Not having to test and validate 2 methods of interacting would certainly reduce your QA costs and allow you to deliver quicker. It's all speculation of course on my part.

 

Back in the day (well not that long ago now that I think of it) almost all softwares had a light UI (softimage, Photoshop, Maya, Max), I actually wonder how people could spend days working with these bright interfaces.

Anyway I think the new UI will be one of the launching features for unity 2019. That would make sense, a brand new interface for a brand new unity version.

 

CRT monitors were generally dimmer than LCDs. With normal office lighting a light interface wouldn't have been anywhere near as bright as it is now.

 

Softimage wasn't that light actually. It wasn't as dark as modern UIs but it was significantly darker than the other software you cited.

 

No, Citing Maya as a reason they *can't* change. Same for Max. Max and Maya have thousands of companies using them, all enterprise. All of them have clear staff training strategies. A change to the UI costs them money. And that's not funny to Autodesk, so they absolutely minimise changes, and if they do happen, they happen SLOWLY.

Cos the moment big customers have to do a lot of re-training, the question drops on the table: "maybe we're better off considering other options". And there are companies all over the place promising to be the better option with a stable or configurable UI.

So changing UI's are *seriously* risky for business.

 

I agree with you on that. Not to mention the amount of tutorials and content that would have to be updated for the new version of the UI, if the changes were significant enough and happened overnight.
This shouldn't happen with tools like Unity.
It's like putting an 80s pilot in a 2018 plane which has electronic button/touch controls for speed, altitude and other parameters, instead conventional steering sticks and dials they are used to and asking them to fly from London to New York with no major introduction or buffer phase where they could gradually learn the changes implemented. It would require them to go back to the simulator.
Big jumps in UX design are okay for general consumer products but for the professional tools, they very risky business indeed.

 

Lots of companies, especially larger ones with large teams, have their own front end running on top of Maya anyway. It's a hot mess and has been for a while now. So in many cases, users aren't ever looking at Maya, they're seeing just what they need for their role.

We're talking about improving the UI, not making gigantic changes to it making the functions unrecognizable from one version to another. Change should be slow, but change will be recognizable nonetheless.

You're over-inflating the impact. If the functionality remains the same it's not going to require re-training, users aren't idiots, if a font was changed or the contrast of the elements was tweaked or there are additional affordances applied to make things clearer and more recognizable, it's supposed to enhance the usability. Any company worth it's salt will have tested and validated these changes and have the metrics to back it up. Usability enhancements are much different than design enhancements. One is proven, the other is subjective and up to the opinion of a designer.

My point of view is simple. Change what doesn't work, leave everything else the same.

Autodesk does what it wants and that's been the case for many years. They have a captive audience. It's not as if people are going to abandon Maya in droves, what else are they going to use? Blender?

 

I can see both sides of this one. Personally there are lots of areas where I want to see UI changes in Unity, and so I tend to broadly support a lot of their plans on this front. And I think their intentions are reasonably clear, quite a bit of stuff is going to change, although I bet there will be further occasions where there is a backlash that gives them pause for thought.

It's tricky, because as some other have already pointed out, professionals that rely on tools to do their job and have to get results within time constraints, do not want to be confronted by a lot of arbitrary changes that suddenly appear. This is an issue in many areas, for example in music DAWs there are always people clamouring for new features and workflow improvements, but there are also a solid base of users who want to keep their software reasonably up to date without having some UI revolution forced upon them.

I suppose in an ideal world this is one of those areas which gives value to the very idea of 'modularising unity', a much touted change of approach that they've clearly put a fair amount of effort into in recent years. But I think its probably also likely another example where the theoretical gains of modularisation dont always come true. eg Unity wont want to have to make all their features support 2 different sets of UI code, design and functionality for long, and so even if you have the choice to stick with a 'classic UI' module, you know that choice also has a life expectancy and wont be treated to all the new features eventually. Likewise, asset store developers who do some stuff with editor UI in their products wont want to have to support two different systems. And certain versions of modules only work with certain versions of Unity anyway. Put all these and other factors together and modularisation looks like less of a saviour in general, including in this area where in theory it could offer solutions for 'big interface improvements' vs 'interface change conservatism' splits.

 

Every time. Software changes its UI -> people uproar -> people get used to it -> goto 10.

This is a very natural and understandable action and reaction and really happens every time.
Just look into the uproar when FB or Gmail changes its UI. Not put just two icons in, changes completely. I've managed a couple of UI changes in software (both desktop and web) and I can tell you this is completely expected and understandable. Also the 'get used to' part.

 

Yes thats a phenomenon I recognise, and to be honest it often leads me to moan at the people who moan about change. Because so far in life I tend to embrace most changes. However, in reality I suppose both of these positions are extremes that are flawed, because they dont really take account of whether the change was actually a good one or not. Only time allows such judgements to truly dawn.

Its a shame humanity hasnt found the perfect solution to these sorts of issues, because they can be very demoralising for both users and developers/companies. Nobody wants to hear loads of people moaning about something they've put a lot of time into and are proud of, and nobody wants to feel ignored and without any say or control over the tools they use. Criticism should not be rejected out of hand because it is considered a knee-jerk response to change, but that reality also has to be factored into the extent that companies listen to such criticism. Tricky balances to be struck, that can lead to inertia or outrage if handled incorrectly. What a minefield this stuff can be. Everyone wants the right changes at the right time, but its anybodies guess as to when and what those are, and there will never be true consensus or the elimination of risk that the wrong options are chosen.

 

I don't know if Unity has UX designers and have a ton of paperwork where they're testing UI changes on people and on real work. I will give them the benefit of the doubt because lately they act professional on every level.

UI changes don't happen like "one day a developer get up in the morning and decides that they will change the UI". It happens with a lot of work both in the software and in the focus groups and by the researchers.

Usually it's not just like "let's make the change and pray for the best". So no, usually it's not "time will tell", rather "time already told".

Now of course I will reserve the right to be wrong in terms of Unity since I don't have first hand information if they actually did the research or not.

 

I wasnt implying that the decisions would be made so randomly, not at all. But I dont care how much planning, testing and feedback is done, the ultimate test still only happens when something is out there in the wild, in front of the entire userbase, and so that is why I will always stick to 'time will tell', no matter how well or badly the earlier phases of design & implementation were handled.

With the benefit of hindsight, if I were ever trying to make a tool like Unity (not likely), I'd try to get my major UI changes done within the first handful of years, before any 'long term pro users' of the product existed and had become settled in their ways. The quality of the original UI design and underlying tech used to make the UI tick and a whole bunch of luck and other factors weigh into that picture though, sometimes the cards wont fall in the right way despite best intentions. And in the case of Unity they maybe missed a couple of historical opportunities to start the switch, and now its happening at a time when many other changes that some might find overwhelming are happening.

Personally I really love some of the new UI that certain Unity teams have had the luxury of building by virtue of their modules being completely new parts to Unity, Such as Shader Graph and the new HDRP VFX system to give two rather dramatic examples.

 

If they just created skin profiles/presets including the old/new style, it would solve the problem entirely.

 

They do:

 

I dont much like the sound of this. Sounds like some Silverlight type shennanigans. But better to just include the chrome renderer and have full html compatibility. But thats not likely to happen.

 

Hi,

Is there anything to do in order to preview this new UI, I have 2019.1.0a7 and it's exactly the same as previous versions of Unity...

I am trying to go trough docs and readme, but I see nothing... very confused

Bye,

Jean

 

https://forum.unity.com/forums/ui-systems-previews.178/

 

Builds showing off the new UI are seperate from the official alpha builds. Below is a link to the thread discussing the new UI and a link to the latest build for previewing the new UI.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/new-editor-theme.564484/
https://beta.unity3d.com/download/0e0eae132335/public_download.html

 

Hi

ok, cool, thanks for the infos.

Bye,

Jean

 

I don't see any new UI. Someone knows when Unity is going to publish the new UI?

 

Did you check the post two posts above this one? Or the forum that it links to?

 

Yes. I downloaded it and the UI looks exactly the same as old previous versions. I don't see change of appearance.

 

This is how "new UI" looks like on my machine. Unity version: 2019.1.0a12

 

That's not the same. You need to download THAT SPECIFIC version to see the UI. The alpha software does not contain the new look yet.

 

I downloaded the version you posted as well as the newer ones. It looks all the same with minor differences.

 

Now it works. I had to rebuild the unity assembly to see the new UI.

 

Can you tell me when new UI goes official beta?

 

When it's ready?

 

SoonTM.

 

Does anyone know when the new editor UI be available? Could you at least estimate? It's important. I will be grateful for an answer.

 

Tomorrow

 

Your answer is, never really on future features. You won't be disappointed.

 

If the new UI is the one in 2019.3a5+ i Really like it. It feels much sharper and cleaner and yet everything is in the correct place as before. The best to describe it is looking at the unity interface after you put your glasses back on.

 

Its just a new skin / theme, not a new user interface

 

In that case I would have expected to have a New Unity program/product called 'Unity ECS' (or something) with a new interface developed from the ground up with all the ECS, Jobs and Dots etc. where the interface is dedicated to the new workflow. Rather then the struggle between Mono and ECS we have now.

 

UIElements came in 2017.1 first, Unity ever since is working on a refactor of the Editor UI. The first batch will roll out in 2019.3 and they will continue to tweak it down the road.

 

It's really not. It is interesting for sure, but important? No. Just be patient it will come when it will come, constant asking about it won't make it come any faster.

 

This.

The new editor UI will be more convinient. But there is literally no new functionality being introduced. There will be nothing you can do with the new system that you can’t do with the existing system.

 

Will, it has the potential to perform better.

Every time I open old Unity 4.x projects I am shocked at how much more responsive everything feels (although various other factors, not related to UI, play into that).

Unity, without fail, every time they introduce a new tech the old one degrades fast and badly, so hopefully the new UI will feel fast in comparison.

 

Light compact good..but I hope that full size was not the way it is going to look...as I can barely read the text. Compared to what I have now, it is smaller. Why, Unity!!!

 

I think the idea with the new one is that, as it'll be UIElements derived, there'll be greater options available for things like font weight and scaling. I hope so, at least.

 

Considering it appears to be based off of the HTML/CSS/JavaScript approach of the web... I wouldn't count on it.