What I miss most about Redacted? Portal page..
I've given it some thought, and I've decided that this layout for portal view is what I miss most about Redacted.
Simple, clean, and functional. This is what I want out of a portal view page. Not this.
I know a lot of work goes into design, but this new design just... missed the mark. By miles.
Look at the top example: everything you might want to do is right there on the left, where your thumb can easily hit it all. Nice big buttons taking up more than half of the screen real estate. A big clear picture of the portal, with an aspect ratio similar to most cameras so little of the photographer's image is cropped, and a big clear view of resonators. Also, there's
What's that? Lefties cant handle the Redacted screen? Have an option to flip sides. Not so hard to program in.
Prime though...
The buttons are not the same size. Nor are they in any real order. Also, since the buttons are ROUND, we will always have some wasted space. I would be doing prime a favor if I claimed 1/4 of the screen was the control buttons, and there are fewer of them. Missions? Navigate? Tough luck, redacted fans.
Notice also the pictures. There are two. We only need one. One is a distorted fire monster with way more animation than anyone needs. Dump it. The other is a tiny square. The top and bottom of whatever was photographed will be cropped off.
Filling up the center of the prime portal page is the portal, and its eight resonators, arranged left and right. Players have noted that certain cases make it very difficult to push these, since they are so close to the edges.
Now I know real ingress (redacted) is never coming back, but with prime, could we maybe revamp the portal page to be a little more user friendly? With big rectangular buttons on one side, including a button for missions, a single larger photo, and resonators aligned up and down?


Comments
There are a lot of improvements in the new screen;
You can directly see the which mods are deployed. and can tap them to deploy your own.
You can directly see where resonators are positioned and their owners and can choose to deploy or upgrade a slot directly from this screen. (I agree that the hit boxes are too small. That had been better in earlier versions of Prime.
So, you can actually reach "deploy resonators" and "mods" from the right side, Just click the slots instead of the button.
The hack button is easier to reach than in Redacted in my opinion.
Starting to glyph is faster because you can tap-swipe instead of having to long-press.
I like that I can see the portal description directly (Nice when exploring new areas)
A big clear picture of the portal, with an aspect ratio similar to most cameras so little of the photographer's image is cropped, and a big clear view of resonators. Also, there's
Also there's what? Don't leave us in suspense, man!
I like the round buttons. Round buttons better fit the area I'm likely to tap while aiming for the centre of the button (and my fingers are not rectangular). You might think that the rectangular buttons waste less space, but actually you're never going to click in the corners of those rectangular buttons so those corners are wasted space. The Hack button is very easy to reach now after tapping on the Portal to open the details screen.
As NineBerry says, the Portal screen now also tells you about the Mods, which Redacted didn't. And there is some info about game state (links, etc) which Redacted also didn't show, although in Prime it's still very difficult to see and so almost useless.
I am not a fan of the distorted fire monster, or of the tiny square Portal pic in the top corner. I also don't like that almost every Portal photo is horribly cropped, whether it's in the square thumbnails or in the key view (which is inexplicably in landscape orientation, while Redacted had portrait orientation and therefore many Portal photos conform to that).
I really don't think it makes a difference whether the resonators are up-and-down or left-and-right, although the current layout makes it impossible to display a Portal with North at the top, which seems a little... untidy.
Please tell me where is the north pole resonnator, because from all I've seen, I didn't find any clue. So how can you tell that one can see where resonators are positioned ?
I don't like the portal page, too. It seems too cluttered and without any order. Why would you need deploy button for example, at all? If you can go to reso or mod deploy right away.
When your select a resonator slot, there is a small yellow circle in the background that shows the position the resonator will be deployed at.
It seems you didn't get it. On redacted, there was a little red mark on a slot idicating this slot will place a resonator in the Northern direction. This allowed people to coordinate and say which deploys which, for example someone deploys N and NW, other W and SW and so on. Now there's no clue as to which slot represents North, so no possibility to coordinate this.
I really don't think it makes a difference whether the resonators are up-and-down or left-and-right, although the current layout makes it impossible to display a Portal with North at the top, which seems a little... untidy
Put-down, or left-right normally would not make much difference, but with the hit boxes so small, and so close to the edge of the screen, it does matter for some:
If you play with your phone in certain cases, the border of the case can come up near the edge of the screen, making it hard to hit buttons close to the edge of the screen. This can be worsened if the phone is also in a protective screen, such as joggers sometimes wear, or if the user is wearing conductive gloves, as more players are likely to discover during the winter.
If they were farther from the edge of the screen, orientation wouldn't be an issue, but as is...
Now there's no clue as to which slot represents North,
The map screen has a compass on it. Have everyone orient their map so that the red compass needle points very slightly right of the top. Now when you enter the Portal view the North resonator will be the top right one.
Not as easy to use as the red dot, sure. But it's not "no clue".
the ui on prime compared to redacted is like day and night compared :(
@starwort
Compass doesnt work in Prime for users who have phones without magnetometers.
Even though the compass DOES WORK in pokemon Go without a magnetometer.
I've mentioned that issue repeatedly, but a certain other person on this forum continues to disbelieve me.
Thanks for highlighting this issue!
It's incredible how much design work can be spent going in the wrong direction.
If one wants to design a piece of art you can leave out usability, but for designing UI things look quite different! And honestly it seems that for designing the prime UI nobody really cared to check how it's been used up to now and what players would want / need as an IMPROVEMENT!
Compass on the map screen..
Working for POGO, not working for Ingress. Same place, same phone.
Seems like phones need magnetometers to work with prime. They say it's a hardware issue. But Pokemon Go can tell me where north is without that hardware.