Hi,

I made a graphic displaying some flaws with the way Skyrim's interface handles screen real-estate. It is interesting how many basic rules of design were broken, as well as a few generally odd decisions. From what I understand, Skyrim's interface was intended to be streamlined and faster to use, but the result is the opposite. This is because the menu system is riddled with simple design flaws that slow down the player's workflow. This causes the player to spend far more time traversing the menus than is necessary, and less time enjoying the game.

It can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/skyriminterface

Any thoughts or suggestions to add to the chart? If you agree and want to get Bethesda's attention over these issues, please share that tinyurl address on Twitter, Facebook and these forums. Thanks!

EDIT: Also support it on Reddit, where it has http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mcr6q/usage_of_screen_realestate_in_skyrims_interface/!

EDIT: Wow, this graphic has been mentioned in http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/user-interfarce-skyrims-silly-choices/. NIce!

Good point, it is actually quite... odd.

Excellent! And very true.
I'd LOVE it to look like a real RPG screen where I can browse enjoyably like the Morrowind one you depict.
I can't imagine why they dropped that for this ugly nightmare of a UI.
I keep reading it's to do with xbox - I pity xbox players if this is the level of play they are restricted to.
I wish Bethesda would split the company up and have one for PCs only... and not try to make it one size fit all!

Well...i like the menu. I'm developing websites at work and in my freetime and empty space is an absolute must to not have your screen look bad (i don't like that morrowind menu you posted to be honest as i don't like the two worlds 2 menu...i like lists and don't need little image that require even more space).

So...mod it if you like but i think bethesda made a pretty good menu and for me its sufficient. And don't complain about me using 360 controller, my brother uses mouse and keyboard (and hey, he is left-handed) and is pleased, too.

I dunno...


I agree with the fact that lists start far down...

But at the same time I can bare with Excel inventories like Morrowind and oblivion and WoW and EQ and and and.... It's all just the same crap.

I like lists like this. Just somethings could be fixed. 1 is to start them higher up on the screen. 2 is to let us decide how the lists are supposed to be organized. (3) adding bags so we can sublist items we don't want to see... And a comparison system that let's us compare certain items.
Also making the Apparel and weapons tab display the character with some stats...

But no way do I wish them to go back to an excel sheet...GO lists!

Hah Iavra was first...

And to add to it I use mouse and keyboard aaand am left handed...

Make this man president!

Great picture, really highlighting how badly a lot of the interface was done - and all without you even going in to how badly the mouse handles the UI!

Also - I *HATE* the fact I have no way to see active effects without going through all the menu system again - I have no quick way to know whether or not to stop moving and re-cast muffle for instance, feels like a complete oversight in their "streamlining" of the whole game & interface.

I agree OP.

I am still wondering that the heck happened the PC UI that was being developed, clearly this is not a PC UI. In essence it is the exact same UI as fallout 3, with some minor changes.

Anyone else starting to feel like if Fallout 3 was oblivion with guns, Skyrim is starting to feel like Fallout with swords? The Ui does at least.



That is a good point, some kind of buff/debuff display is for sure needed.

Empty space is a good thing, however too much is a waste. The (initial) magic menu takes up only 1/14th of the screen real estate, which is a taking the 'empty space' idea way overboard. If the rest of the screen had some basic information listed on it (our Active Effects, for example), then we wouldn't have to visit the sub-menus as often. It would reduce the amount of clicking we have to do in order to reach the information we want.

If you develop websites at work, then I'm sure you know how important limiting the number of user interactions is. Any webpage more than 3 clicks away from the homepage has serious problems with getting hits. That's because people find clicking through too many screens to be tedious - and it is tedious in Skyrim as well. The worst example is Active Effects - because it is of crucial importance to gameplay, yet you must perform 4(!) actions to simply find out what they are.

Except the inventory lists in Skyrim are linear and extremely narrow. Not that many items can be listed at once, which almost inevitably requires scrolling. Limiting scrolling is a good thing, so we need more inventory items to be visible on the screen at once. That's pretty hard, however, when just a single item (the selected one) takes up 2/3 of the entire screen. We don't need that giant carrot there - we need that space to display more inventory items. Then we wouldn't have to scroll as much, because more would be visible on the initial screen.

Morrowind's system is one way of taking advantage of both horizontal AND vertical space to show a good number of inventory items. I just used it as an example. It's not necessarily the best or only way.

Excellent visuals! It conveys the message clearly, and it's worse than I was even thinking. However, I did figure one thing out from your diagram - I had no idea that inventory menu was "scroll-able"; I couldn't figure out why they had that strange overlap of the column and the bottom bar. But you also raised another excellent point: Why in the world is that list so low in the first place? It's completely unnecessary.

Regardless if some of you don't mind it, it's an extremely inefficient design. Sure, you can get used to it, but it demonstrates a severe lack of efficiency on the part of the designers, which in my opinion is indicative of deeper issue. A common thread through all the issues on the forums starts to emerge. Game design and programming is supposed to demonstrate high standards of efficiency. Efficiency is extremely important in the computer world (and lest we forget, even consoles are computers).

BGS really needs to have this shown to them. Maybe you could do a PowerPoint presentation for them.

True but just part of the design disaster - from the lack of configuration options to the bad placement of selection boxes to different type of popup choices and key or mouse options for those choices (intermittent use of e/r vs. Y/N or others), and on down to scrolling and mouse clicks having variable or not effects.

I am not encouraged thinking about what it will take to fix this.

And for people who love random behavior in menus and lots of controller or key clicks to get from one item to another, and selection boxes on menu items being in the wrong places, there should be an option to leave everything the way it is.

Indeed, it's quite troubling. Knowing what effects are active is crucial during gameplay, especially just before or during a fight. Are my resistances up? Is my armor still fortified from earlier? Did that enemy spell just poison me? Is my Destruction skill still fortified? It is also important during sneaking, since there are a whole range of magic effects that can make you sneak better. If one of those suddenly runs out, you really need to know about it.

Finding out, however, is way too many steps:
1, Tab
2, click 'Magic'
3, Scroll down
4, Click 'Active effects'

The main reason this ties into the whole 'screen real estate' issue is that the Magic Menu is full of empty screen real estate where these Active Effects could have been listed!

Agree with every point you raised. It looks like such a horrifically inefficient design. I first played Morrowind on the XBox, and don't recall ever having any problems with the UI. Why they've felt the need to "streamline" it by making it more clunky is beyond me. Very much looking forward to a UI mod to sort it all out. The more info on-screen the better. In terms of active effects, what was wrong with Morrowind's method of a little icon that fades as the effect is running out, giving you just enough time to go into a magic menu/ hit a hotkey to renew it?

I wholly agree with this thread and I would like to congratulate the OP for the great graph.

I just have one more complaint about the interface, namely the dialogue menu. Why on earth would BGS make the player options fit into such a narrow and short(!) list, where half the time you won't even realize how many actual lines your character has without scrolling to the very bottom. There have literally been moments where an NPC has asked my character something and I am given a list of replies and it's only later that I realize I had more replies available, but they didn't fit into that tiny list and weren't even visible without scrolling, nor was there any indication that scrolling was possible.

I'm in complete agreement with the OP. This is the worst menu system I've seen in any game (in fact probably any piece of software, at least that I can think of offhand) and doesn't really achieve anything: specifically, its presentation of information is unhelpful and obtuse and it's astonishingly cumbersome to use, requiring far too many actions to get even basic information, most of which are inconsistent and unintuitive. I'm also genuinely concerned that its use is causing an albeit minor hand injury to flare up again: does nobody test software for its ergonomic effects any longer?

Hopefully one of the big names from TES or Fallout modding can give it an overhaul and bring it closer to how it should've been in the first place; if it's even possible to salvage.

I absolutely despised Morrowind's menu system. My favorite of the three games is Oblivion's. That said, I agree they waste a lot of space. Would it have been THAT hard to allow a toggle into a better list mode?

You know, personally i love the new UI. It's easy to use - Mostly because you never have to move your hands. Everything can be done with your left hand resting on the controls.

After a few hours of playing i can't imagine going back to older TES UI's. Once you get a feel for it it's so fast to do anything you want, and i honestly don't understand the complaints anymore. Sure, i was sceptic when i saw it in demos but now i've been using it for 20 hours or so, it feels great, MUCH better than Morrowind and Oblivion (BTmod).

I wasn't a fan either, but it was still a lot better than what we have at present.

I've been playing for about 40 hours now and I'm still struggling with it: it's just too unintuitive for me and requires far too much effort to view almost any information. It's not helped by the numerous bugs with key remapping where other functions using the same keys are randomly remapped or not, are often mislabelled, and a single keypress often erroneously performs two unrelated actions (e.g. swapping F and R and pressing the latter to take all items from a container will also trigger 3rd person mode at the same time.) I'm finding it very frustrating to use.

There should at least be options to control how the information is presented: I mean, if Morrowind supported areas being moved around and resized, why is a newer and arguably more advanced game completely rigid in that regard? And there should be a simple checkbox to indicate whether the player wants to see icons, text or both instead of having a long list of text-only descriptions compressed into an inexplicably narrow area.

How about make it so I can click on every thing, instead of having to guess when I need to keyboard scroll and when I can mouse click..

Exiting the game is a prime example, I have to use my keyboard to scroll to the word exit, cant click it but I can click to go to the main menu or desktop.


What is also strange, in this forum is that I can use my arrow keys to navigate text in the quick reply but not in a full edit window. Only way to edit in here is to move the cursor with a mouse click.

D'oh ! They could just make the background fade away when inspecting items. And how many times you even have had to inspect something for clues? I have only once, so it's not a valid point to say it's a good reason to leave the space unused 99,9% of the time.

Excellent graphic.

People keep on saying that the UI is just not designed well for PC. This is incorrect. The UI is just not designed well, period. Console, PC, doesn't matter. Every screen is bad. Every. One.

I like turning my gear and watching it from all angles...and

How about..... an inspect button!

It's getting seriously annoying how it now takes more then 10 seconds to just scroll through my inventory. This is almost solely because I'm stacked with valuables that I can't sell because the merchants are too poor to buy them.

If nothing else
*Favorites/Equiped items should be listed separately in the inventory
*You shouldn't have to go through 5 menus to see what buffs/debuffs are active
*It shouldn't take me almost 10 keypresses to keybind a new weapon i pick up
*It shouldn't take me almost a minute to find out where in the gargantuan list of Potion of **** my healing potions are
*You should be able to keybind entire sets of weapons/armor at once.

Buy a house and store your stuff or get some speechcraft perks (this skilltree isn't there just for fun )

Zeno's raised a very legitimate point, and I agree with everything he said. Morrowind's interface wasn't as pretty, sure, but it was much more functional. Even Oblivion's UI was better. Apparently this UI is okay on consoles, though, but for PC users it's simply atrocious.