making a more user-friendly interface for touch

[eight-eighty-eight]

Note

sorry, but videos refused to embed for some reason :( hope this doesnt affect anything much

a while back i played osu!(lazer) with my mom, her playing on mobile. this was her first time, so she wasnt familiar with the ui, and watching her attempt to navigate the ui was kinda painful. her being a new user emulates what an ordinary person would do opening the game for the first time, completely unfamiliar with it, so i wanted to highlight a few things:

Important

for a little context: my mom does have vision problems and she wears glasses. so she had to use max UI / large UI. for the sake of simplicity and demonstration, i will also be using max UI scale.

first launch experience

setup wizard

during the setup wizard, she would keep accidentally tapping the empty space near the next and back keys and closing setup. https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/70a4ceeb-3464-46d6-9883-cc4d97ac02f9
there are multiple ways we can fix this, but i think the simplest is making the space between the footer and the main content not do anything. you could also make it so that only the x key works, but i think the former is better. you could also make the x key a "close" key instead, so it pops out and it's clear what it actually does.

after the wizard, the title is shown. the logo doesn't scream "click me!" to most people, and i think the music and visualizer could point to it being a cutscene, so only after my guidance did she actually click it. i think there could be a small coachmark saying "let's play!" and pointing to the logo.

auth modal

then we have to log in. this process is more convoluted than it needs to be on mobile, as the touch keyboard overlaps the ui and the keyboard just HATES to cooperate with the user. everything below the password field is blocked by the keyboard, and you cant tap out of the field like the rest of the ui. it's SOOO annoying to get working.

experience

now let's move onto the general experience.

main menu

this screenshot has so many problems with it, i barely want to cover it, but let's get it out of the way. (this is full UI scale, as a reminder)

1. the menu bar is cut off, half of the time is cut off, notification key falls off the screen, and the rulesets carousel falls off the screen.
2. the settings key in the main nav falls off the screen.
3. the tip string and event notification at the bottom of the screen overlay the main nav.

this is just PAINFUL to not only look at, but also use.

settings popout

because of all these inconsistencies and problems with the full UI scale, my mom had to go to settings. she typed in UI, and kept trying to click this magnifying glass glyph to search for it.

there are 2 fixes i could think of for this. you could either make the magnifying glass glyph a key, or you could remove the glyph all together. i think this is a minor issue, but everything counts.

mp lobby screen

in the lobby, the ui is COMPLETELYYY broken. i'm pretty sure this has already been mentioned, but for people who play on full scale UI, this is just another step to play the game.

we could remove the top bar with the lobby info, and if we really want to keep that, we could possibly make it a "details" or "room info" dropdown. we could have the "Multiplayer • Room" text become a "Multiplayer • Room Details" text, with the highlighted "Room Details" text becoming a key to open the details dropdown. the footer also takes up alot of space, so we could merge the footer actions with the main content to allow more room and remove the backdrop completely. that should be enough to fix our problem.

thanks for reading!

apologies that this was a semi-rant, but this is one of my favorite games and to see so many issues with it pains me :( love you all!

[peppy]

Thanks for your feedback. Please drop your UI scale down until it's usable as a starting point, you have it set too high for your device.

Most of what you've said is already discussed elsewhere and known by us. A lot of the current design is "get things working", rather than "make it the best UX". We'll continue to iterate where it makes sense. Especially with mobile, which is a second focus as we are a PC first game (and always will be).