The UI is specifically designed for console controllers. With a mouse and keyboard, it's awkward, wonky, inefficient, space-wasting, and the keybinding behavior is seriously borked.

Take the conversation option selection menu, for example: There's a white arrow on the left side, and the options are arranged in a column. It's designed for console players to page up and down through the options, then press a button when the arrow is beside the option they want. If PC players use WASD and Enter, it works much the same. If you try to select things with the mouse pointer, left mouse button and/or the scroll wheel, however, the option that actually gets selected when you scroll and click can be very dicey, even after patch 1.2. Before patch 1.2 (which also broke the arrow keys), it was even dicier.

Then there's crafting. Crafting with the mouse pointer and LMB is an inefficient mess, with Enchanting being the worst offender. Instead of being able to click every necessary option within a small portion of the screen, you have to click options on the left side, then either press Enter or move the mouse cursor way over to the right to click the Enter icon, then press R or move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to click the R icon, then press Y or move the mouse cursor to the middle of the screen to click Yes. It's ridiculous — a single series of pop-up menus that you hardly have to move your mouse away from as you select options would be much easier and more efficient to use.

And then there's the inventory/trade interface. Trying to use the mouse, LMB, and/or scroll wheel works okay-ish, but it can be very wonky, and also fussy about where you click. You can quit the inventory menu accidentally by clicking too far to the left or right of a category, for example, even if the pointer is directly over a word. As well, on the PC, a grid layout (as shown in one of the many mock-up images) would be far better than a long, single-column list of categories and items. When PC players see those mock-ups, they say, "HOLY CRAP WHERE CAN I GET THAT!?" They say that because they know such a UI would be far superior to the current one.

Hotkeys are still there.....though you have to look up how ot use it in the game manual.

Basically, when you bring up the favorites menu in gameplay, hover the mouse over and item and press a number 1-9 to assign it ot the key. Warning, does not work for dual wielding things.

Interesting...I had no idea. That should help a little. I think I tried everything but that. (And by "everything," I mean pressing F1 and the numbers themselves, lol)

When you have favourited skills and spells, you can hover over them and click 1-8. Dualwielding is messed up, whenever you click either sword it will sheathe and draw the new sword in the right hand. Things get messed up real fast. But if you're onehanded, you can click your main weapon with the right mouse button, and make it 1, then maybe bow 2, then shield left mouse 3 (not picked together with sword in favorites, then it messes up, just left hand and 3), and then spells left hand 4-8. If you have a spell on 4, and click 4 twice you will doublewield. Then 1+3 to quickly go to sword and board. Shouts are on z, I don't know if they can be hotkeyed I switch them around from the favourites.

Because it's "form over function" design. And i'm not wild about it's form either.

Other people have already stated most of it, but I want to add that if you try to use the mouse scroll wheel in the Enchanting menu (something that does mostly work in other menus) or use the mouse to click on the item name when renaming an item (because that is naturally how you position a cursor at the point where you want to insert text), it can completely freeze up the menu so that you can't make any other selections, and when you exit your character is frozen and cannot move or activate anything or bring up any menus so have to CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the game and close it down in the task manager. Stupid me for trying to use a mouse to do something on a PC, silly silly me!!! Or wait, could it be that the UI is rubbish on PC? Hmmm.....

I miss indicators for temporary effects. I don't undrestand why they were left out. They are important for gameplay.

i play on console and i think that new UI looks alot better

I guess some people don't mind, or even applaud, when they open their character's inventory and see the first entry halfway down the screen with sub-categories scrolling down past the bottom of the screen. At the very least, I'd like to be able to see all the sub-categories without having to scroll!

Plus, all the other silliness mentioned above. Skill constellations shure look purty, but are a mess to navigate. The whole UI design is an example of form over function, but I guess some people got raises or bonuses for coming up with it.

You can keep your UI built especially for you. Bethesda doesn't have to make a new UI for console, the current UI is already designed for console.

I will assume the op is serious about wanting to know how the UI can be improved.

The PC has more than 100 keys, but we are not allowed to assign them all. It would be great to assign any key to any spell/skill/weapon/armor.

As is, as a mage, I spend more time in "pause mode" switching spells/weapons/outfits than I do in "real time" combat. This kills immersion.

This I agree with.
It's very useable (pc user), and I only have some minor gripes with it, manily to do with scrolling and grouping. For the inventory specifically, the list style is much nicer than a grid style - I really don't like grid style.

The interface seems to svck for every platform, wether it being difficult to navigate on pc, or just being a pita on the console with no real order to the way that crafting, favorites, and skills are set up. I am kind of disappointed with how they set up some other things as well.

For example alot less options and (so far to my knowledge) no way to make magic. The potions seems to be in good condition, but how do you take being able to create any kind of spell, or summon something like 20-30 diffrent dadera, undead, ect to like 4 atronachs, 2

dadera, and a familuar. Also I think some of the story line is crap, you couldn't have come up with any better name for a group of silent radicals other then the "Greybeards" ? By level 22 with an orc I was able to kill blood dragons in less then a second making the game


almost pointless to continue with the same charc, and that was using no cheats just duel ebony axes (plain) with elemental fury and my one hand perks that increase damage and attack speed maxed out...after raising game difficulty you would think the AI would of

increased. The fact you can't wear two rings, even though the big deal was dual weilding weapons and magic (go figure). And half the enchantments you can't do because they are either given as initiations (e.g. dark brotherhood, theives guild), or amulets of the divines, or

quest items, lowering your options with that as well. I do play on the console, and other then getting to duel weild weapons and the graphics and size of the game, I am quite disappointed from oblivion. Sure it doesn't bug up as much, but you slouched on the storyline, gave

us a crappy interface, took out many of the options and freedoms that made us wish for another elder scrolls, and yes the map looks cooler in 3D and true view of the landscape, but we can't even zoom in to tell us what road or path we are currently on. The zooming in and

out only gets caught on the throat of the world, or whatever higherlandscape you might be near. All in all, you made a GREAT GAME into a mediocore one with great graphics and better frame rate. GG

This is the single worst offender I have ever seen in a game. My enchanting locks my movement literally 9 out of 10 attempts to enchant things.
Fortunately, I've found that after the game locks your movement (if it did not also freeze), you can wait a few minutes and it'll come back.

How the game will freeze movement for 5 minutes then fix itself is mind-boggling.

Hahahah.

It's clunky on the PC. You can't map keys to how you want them to be (although that's okay with me), and the keys needed for certain actions aren't consistent. For example, when you craft things, if the game tells you that you can't craft something, you HAVE to use the mouse to click on the 'OK' button. Also when you read the stone tablets leading up to the Greybeards. These are the only two times of which I can think when you're supposed to use the mouse in a menu. It's a little bit annoying having this inconvenience thrown at you.
Then there's also the fact that, if you dual-cast a spell, you can't totally deselect it. The most you can do is assign the left hand to something else through the quick/favourites menu. If you want to assign your right hand to another spell as well, you have to go all the way to the weapons screen, put weapons in both of your hands, deselect the weapons again, and then go all the way back to the magic screen or the quick/favourite menu to assign the new spell as dual-cast. (Does that sound complicated? Now imagine just how long it took me to figure that out!) And it doesn't even do the same thing for weapons! Just for magic!
The lockpicking minigame is annoying with a mouse. (But that's not really UI.)
In the Skills/Levelling screen you have to use the mouse to get around, because the keyboard's direction keys are too clunky as a directional indicator.

Et cetera. Et cetera.

roosterdad is right. Either you don't play on the PC, or you have really low standards.

I think that when the time came to design the UI for PC they called up an intern and told him to try some quick flash changes in order to have a usable UI.

This is most obvious because of the inconsistencies in the confirmation dialog boxes.

1. If the choice is "ok" there is no hotkey. You HAVE to click it to continue.
2. Sometimes the options are "yes [enter] no[tab]"
3. other times is "yes no"

This is simply not acceptabe code practices. Very poor coding imho. I can accept that you rather spend time developing content than building a proper pc UI, but there are just simple things that make the design simply sloppy.

Every time the inventory menu mysteriously closes, I want to punch a baby.

Also... it takes six and a half hours to scroll through a container's inventory if you have a lot of items.

A problem that bridges all platforms (I think), is the inability to hotkey things to a specific hand. This prevents dual-wielders from seamlessly transitioning between weapons, and it prevents sword and shield users from sending their heal spell directly to their sword hand (instead of removing their shield).

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302838-wipz-skyui/ is what the UI should have been (after only a few weeks and without the CK)
It's also going to be configurable afaik.

That looks like it has a lot of promise. I'm sure I'll check it out when it's ready. It'd be nice if it dealt with the hotkey issue, though.

Most annoying thing about it is that you always have to pause the game to do anythin. Drinking a hotkeyed potions should not pause the game.