Removing boredom from the UI

HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

I'm pulling this out of a comment thread and expanding on it. I hit L16 in Ingress over five years ago and I'm approaching 250M AP. I'm level 40 in PoGo, and level 40-something in HPWU. In short, I've played a lot of Niantic games in the last six years. There are two things that have always made the games less fun for me-- the amount of time I spend waiting for something to happen, and the amount of boring manual labor involved.

In Ingress there are slow animations, the most annoying of which is the slowness when you tap on a portal. I don't care about the portal slowly expanding on my screen-- it was cool the first thousand times but now it's just a thumb-twiddling moment. There's also toil, and the one most people perform most frequently is recharging their keys. It's an endless task of scrolling, tapping and tapping, sometimes reloading XM, tapping some more, repeat. To be fair, Niantic has done an excellent job of improving the UI for recycling, and having power cubes on screen when you need them is a big win.

PoGo and HPWU have many of the same issues, but the animations are even worse. Some of HPWU's are skippable now. Entering raids in PoGo drives me crazy because I can get there close to the start time and it takes me so long just to get into the gym that I miss out. Gifting is dreadfully slow and tedious... it's pure toil. In HPWU I can't even begin to contemplate how often I've just sat staring at the screen while a registry progress bar scrolls by.

My fantasy is that someone with a job title of Player Experience Guru will be hired at Niantic and their first act will be the royal decree of "All animations must be tap-skippable after the first viewing."

For their next trick they will audit all of the games for boring repetitive tasks that don't advance gameplay and make them efficient.

I will personally thank the person who accomplishes this with homemade cookies and/or a bottle of their preferred booze.

Comments

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yep portal selection animation is very slow. I'd like buttons and interface to appear immediately after I tap it, without waiting while it gets zoomed in. I often lose my chance to deploy a reso exactly because the zoom in animation took precious time and I was already outside of range.

  • My fantasy is that someone with a job title of Player Experience Guru will be hired at Niantic and their first act will be the royal decree of "All animations must be tap-skippable after the first viewing."

    What would you say if they already had one and Prime still was what it is?

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Perringaiden I would want to see their Guru University transcripts.

  • As simple as the original scanner was, the lack of useless animations (or ability to skip, like we could with link animations) made the client much friendlier in actual gameplay.

    I don't want flashy. That looks cool when you make promotional videos, but completely takes away from the ability to use in the field.

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