Bethesda, please hire this guy, and integrate this future essential mod in an official patch, thank you very much.

Dat version 2! Wow...

We can only hope such a magnificent looking UI mod will be possible.

looks great!

Ok webpage was a bad example ^^
But in a book you don't have access to Ctrl+F, if you know what you are looking for is somewhere on ~5 pages, I'm quite sure you skim the pages which takes 10-20 sec instead of reading everything 5-10min.

A search function could be nice, that's true.
When pressing I it could open the inventory and have a search field ready for typing in straight away. (You don't have to press the search field to start typing when you enter the inventory screen).


EDIT:
@Wakeupbrandon.
Sugestion:
Remove the EXP bar (this one is not that necessary or logical to have in an inventory screen).
Move Armor Rating, Carry Weight, Gold to the right, Equip, Drop, Favorite to the left and Hitpoint, Magicka, Fatigue bars down.
Then reduce the height of the lower bar and you should be able to fit in some more text or another grid row.

I'm a console player but...
That looks great.

Yes, I do. If it's a book on my PC. We are still talking about the PC UI, right? Not "Skyrim: The choose-your-own-adventure book"?

For the love of God, YES PLEASE.

there was one thing design wise I also felt was lacking from the overall UI, apart from the Star/skills section the whole thing lacked a certain fantasy flavour over all.

I feel like the only categories search would be useful (for my current playstyle) is potions, misc, and maybe apparel. Sub-categorization, for me, would eliminate that need for search however.

I like the way all of those look.

Assume you're at a well-stocked vendor and want to buy a few alchemy reagents from his 150+ different ones ...

A well-designed search lets you ...

* ... quickly switch between categories (using something like F1-F2-F3-... along with the mouse for them)
* ... select multiple categories (holding down CTRL while clicking them on/off with the mouse or function keys)
* ... restrict your search by self-defined tags (for example a "for sale" tag which you can add to any item when you loot it), also allowing to exclude items with certain tags
* ... and finally have a "live search" updating the item list/grid as you type with whatever it found to match perfectly (on the top/left) or roughly, taking care of typos and spelling mistakes (on the bottom/right, sorted by how close the match is)

The font this forum uses is about the right size I'd like to see in the game.

I get what you're saying, but if I'm buying from this well-stocked vendor, aren't I more interested in buying ingredients that relate to a potion I want to make? Why not make it so I can just go to the potion I have a recipe for (or all the potions each of the store's ingredients could make) and filter it that way, same as an Alchemy Lab? Also, I haven't come across anyone that has more than 30-40 items at most in each category, but then I haven't been to many cities... is 150+ an exaggeration on your part or is there someone who actually does have 150+ ingredients?

I think I'd want to investigate the use cases involved in buying ingredients. To me, the very first that comes to find is, "As an alchemist, I want to buy an ingredient so that I can make a potion." This assumes you already know the potion you want to make. The other one is, "As an alchemist, I want to restock an ingredient so that I can continue making a potion" which assumes you already know the name and what you're looking for. My suggestion above would work for both those use cases.

I don't use alchemy much or buy ingredients, but I can relate to buying crafting materials. I typically go to a blacksmith to find a crafting material I need to make or improve an item. I know the name of what I want, so it's not very hard for me. The only thing I'd suggest for crafting is to have a crafting sub-heading so I can jump to it quicker in the store/my inventory.


I don't think I'm the only one that plays Skyrim on the couch on a large TV (with a wireless kb/m). That font size may be too small; maybe make it adjustable?

Here's just a thought on how the icon-based inventory could be enhanced to display more stats. I took the liberty of modifying Wakeupbrandon's idea. It's plain text added for values of damage / armor, weight and value. Also, the border of the icon shows the type of magic it uses. A hotkey to enable / disable the stats might be useful, too.

http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k120/scratch8o/unsorted/icons_enhanced.png

Why the dragon symbol at the top?

Amazed by our fans' creativity and spirit. Good work, fellows.

Any chances you include this as a PC UI in the next patch?

This just makes me upset at Bethesdas work all the more.

For months, MONTHS before it was out we yelled PLEASE CHANGE IT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

It took someone a few days in photoshop to design a better layout. Terrible really.

Hope this mod doesn't take too long once the mod tools are out

@killmoms - Thanks! As for the Dragon Symbol, it's completely nonfunctional and merely for aesthetic, but to better answer your question — it goes back to my day job, web design. So really I just felt like the Dragon Symbol or Skyrim Logo helped tie back to the branding of the game. Sure, people are never going to forget they're playing Skyrim just like no one forgets when they're on Facebook. The branding is always there though and from a design decision I felt like it helped ground or focus the user into the navigation with some ease making the initial navigation less "floaty".

@Eyonik - Heh, I wish, I'd take some PTO to do some work for Bethesda.

@WikedX - Thanks for the kind words. I wouldn't say it's really a better layout it's just a different take on the design/interaction of Skyrim. I honestly really like Skyrim's UI aside from some of the obvious problems like mouse targets.

@Langy & Scorpius - This was my initial thought too, but then I was thinking it'd be great to either have small icons to denote things like enchants (fire, frost, spark, life drain, etc) and using the 3D model as the icon. Maybe a border to show uniqueness aka MMO style rarity.

For some of the people going back and forth about list vs grid vs whatever. I really like UI's that give the user control over how you want to view it, so in my mockups you could potentially have a list view with the 'paperdoll' or icons with the large 3D model of the item, it'd be up to you. If you look at something like iTunes or even OSX's Finder windows. They do a great job of letting you decide how best for you to digest the information. I'd like to think that with a few more iterations I could achieve the same simplicity in this design. Maybe even a Coverflow style (I kid!). Full disclosure, I'm a list guy myself.

The simple truth is that none of us will know the weight that rested on some poor dude/dudette's shoulder when designing the UI for all platforms, resolutions, HD/SD, Keyboard and Mouse vs Controller etc, the looming deadline of 11/11/11 and knowing that millions of people are going to scrutinize every detail. With that I think they did a pretty decent job — this is simply an exercise for me, bonus points if it ever gets made into a mod.

**Edit**
A lot of people are mentioning the bars, I agree. I actually just pulled these over from another project I was working on to minimize the time I was spending on this.

Can you add further sorting options such as "All, Heavy armor, light armor, accessories, etc." right below the selected category?

This is one of the few mods I would download now rather than waiting until after my first play through - I want this to be an available mod very much.

That is subjective. For me and you, maybe it's a better layout. For my friend who's never played an RPG in his life and wants to play Skyrim? I think it's overwhelming. With no knowledge of what is possible, he will not miss any features me and you have grown accustomed to. That's the cool thing about mods, we can get what we want but leave people like my friend to live in blissful ignorance. He will enjoy the game and we will enjoy the game; not because our layout is "better" but because we are more comfortable in it.


Well said; anyone who's worked even on corporate web projects (or freelance for that matter) understands how it is to work with the business or client. In some cases, they say bark and you bark, as much as it pains you to do so.

This is in the current V2 as a dropdown currently as SHOWING: [ All v ]

Obviously it needs another looking at since it was so easily glazed over I was initially thinking something like you mentioned but trying to keep all the info together in one area.

It's organized and good-looking, but it looks too modern for an Elder Scrolls game. It totally looks like it came out of some modern website.

I don't think you need to change the layout per se, but some details need to be changed and added to make this a Skyrim menu.

Changing the font is crucial IMO (sure, Bethesda used the Futura font in the first place, but that was wrong of them), then I would add some medieval details to the magicka/stamina/health bars, maybe change a bit the texture in the header/footer to something a bit more rustic and whatever other little things you can come up with.

But overall, great job.

This is an incredible improvement, wow

Beth please take note, I want to have this in game very badly.

Simply put, images render faster in the brain than words. At least to me.

If I'm looking for an amulet in a large list (must be huge if you have 25 friggin amulets) than all I have to do is look at the ones with the amulet picture next to it.

Then again this could all be remedied if we had more accurate sorting functions.