Illuminating the UI

Michael · 01-03-2012, 04:17 PM

During the past couple of days, you've had the chance to take a sneak peek at some of my thoughts for the potential future of the Habbo UI (user interface).

I've already received a lot of questions and comments from you guys (which I absolutely love – keep 'em coming!

), so I thought I'd answer to the most common ones here, just to give you some general idea of what the new UI style, Illumina, is all about.

Why are you changing the style again?
We want to make using Habbo as easy and fun as possible, and as a lot of the things that need improvement right now are related to the interface, the best course of action is to create one consistent style that addresses the issues.

What is "Illumina"?
Illumina is the name of our new UI style. Basically it covers both our general visual style AND how you interface with the world, so it's definitely not only about changes in appearance.

Will everything be redesigned?
The new style will affect the entire client, but we are not going to fix things that don't need fixing. A lot of you have been asking specifically about the Volter-based layouts. They will indeed be looked at during the process, but it's too early to say what exactly will happen to them. Who knows, maybe some lost classic elements could even make a comeback at some form along the way

What are the basic principles of the Illumina style?
The new style is being built on three fundamentals:
1) SIMPLIFY: everything should be as simple as possible to use. We want to clear the clutter.
2) UNIFY: everything should work consistently throughout the experience.
3) FOCUS: the people, the rooms, the badges, the furni… the content is what's important, so we're putting the interface focus on that.

So, in one sentence: we're building a clean and modern UI style that let's you concentrate on what's really important.
The other two guiding principles are:
• It's your interface, you choose what's best for you. There'll be more personalization than before.
• The more you can do by directly interfacing with the world, the better. No windows for the sake of having windows.
Are the four images we've seen final?
No. They are early drafts for the style, and may still change (even drastically) based on a lot of factors, including your feedback. You'll see the design iterate as we go along – we'll keep you in the loop, and continue to listen to your ideas and concerns.
You should also notice, that new/changed features shown in the drafts are only for illustrative purposes right now, so you shouldn't read too much into them.

Will we get more features and functionalities with Illumina?
Yes and no. Illumina itself is a style, and not a feature package, but some of the functionalities will change as their appearance and logic are improved. There will definitely be new features and various technical improvements, but they are running in parallel with the Illumina work, and have different release tracks.

When will the new style be released?
It's too early to set hard deadlines for the new style, but you may see some elements starting to improve before others. Obviously we want to get as much of it out as soon as possible

http://www.sulake.com/blog/entries/2...ng_The_UI.html