Why UI is so important

Skyrim is a great game. Regardless of how you rate it in relation to other titles in the Elder Scrolls series, it’s hard to argue that a game with 30 million copies sold that gets remastered every 6 months thanks to its popularity, is a bad game. It has a decent story, fun albeit not very complex game mechanics, and a huge world filled with plenty of quests to explore – there’s a reason people replay it so much.

One thing that Skyrim doesn’t have however, is a good UI. If you’re used to playing Skyrim on consoles, you might not notice this as much, but for those of us that play it on PC, Skyrim’s UI is often at best not getting in the way, and at worst a clunky disorganised mess that makes navigating it to find anything a nightmare.

When going through your inventory, you’re met with a collection of 9 categories, which somehow still require scrolling to all be viewed. In the inventory itself, items are displayed in a huge, text only list, while selecting one provides players with a huge 3D model taking up about two-thirds of the screen. The same can be said for magic, with a small menu off to the side requiring the player to scroll through scores of text to find what they’re looking for. Indeed Skyrim’s UI is so bad to use on PC, that there are scores of mods dedicated to improving it to provide players with a better experience.

This is the core challenge of UI design – creating something useful and appealing to look at, without making something that gets in the way of the player. UI should be a means of achieving something easily, without interrupting the game, and when it’s done right players rarely even notice it’s there.

And to see some excellent UI design, fans of the Elder Scrolls series don’t even need to travel particularly far, with Morrowind providing an example of some of the best UI design in the series. Rather than the endless walls of text and menus to scroll through, Morrowind’s inventory provides a clear set of menus from the start, with each section containing icons instead of text, making it incredibly easy to open it up, immediately click what you want, and leave. It’s such a simple and effective way of dealing with the challenge of UI, that some of the most popular mods for both Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls: Online are Morrowind-style UI mods.

And this problem doesn’t stop with Skyrim, nor does it stop with menus. With the increasing popularity of open-world titles, especially in AAA studios, comes the need to provide players with more content, filling the world with things to do so that it doesn’t seem empty. And symptom of this is that maps in these games can often become cluttered – filled with so many different icons denoting ‘There’s something here to do’ that searching through them to find something you actually want becomes a chore, while the sheer number of things to do risks making overwhelming players and putting them off doing any.

Breath of the Wild deals with this well by taking the opposite approach. Rather than immediately showing players where everything is, it leaves the map mostly blank – and at the start without much of the map filled in. It’s up to the player to fill in the map by exploring, with everything from towers and towns to shrines and korok seeds only showing up on the map after being found by the player. It means that rather than telling the player everything at once, it lets them go at their own pace and discover things as and when they want to. Moments in the game where I felt genuinely excitement after finding something cool wouldn’t have had half of that impact if the game had told me to go there.

UI is certainly not the be-all and end-all of gaming. As with Skyrim, you can have a not-great UI and still have an incredible and fun experience in a game. In my view, UI is for the most part not about creating a better experience, but rather preventing a worse experience. It should be about creating a way of conveying information to the player or allowing them to change certain things, without getting in the way of them. A bad UI is one which actively makes things more difficult for the player and is noticeable in how it gets in the way, while a great UI is often one that players don’t even notice at all. You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone and in gaming there’s few things that applies to more than with UI.