Often times the way I test if a software has great UX or not, I simply think what I want to do and attempt to use menus that describe the action and/or result, even if I don’t know how.
Where UX usually fails is when:
-There is an obscure setting that is a must to complete an action but not found directly in an obvious UI
-When there is a technical term that stops you from understanding how to complete the action.
-When there is a workaround that you, as the user, do not know, but it is a must to proceed, and the tool doesn’t help/ tell you about it.
-When there is no tooltip or help button to help you figure out a tool that is confusing
I have so many examples from UEFN but this time I’ll mention control rig, because it has all the above:
- My assumption is that the most common thing to do in a control rig is to assign controls to bones. Yet the process to create a bone or control is not visible anywhere but is found as a sub-menu when right-clicking a bone.
Here is an example of how it passes the test:
The buttons to create the controls are shown when you hover with the mouse on a bone, right next to the name:
Also a button on the interface that opens a sub-menu of the rig hierarchy without pressing, just hovering, then when you hover on a bone you get “get”, “set”, “control”
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Full body IK:
Since most rigs name the bones the same way, can’t there be a button to assign the four controls without having to adjust and duplicate and unparent, etc. Just look at how AccuRIG finds all limbs automatically and assigns the bones, same thing can happen here, and it would be even easier to track than ActorCore because you already have the bone names. A macro button to generate 4 controls from the full body IK node is what would pass the UX test there -
Why do we have to unparent controls to make them work?
This is another example of having to do a workaround on a process that should otherwise be straightforward. You want to add a control, but the limb would get stretched the moment you connect it to anything in the forwards solve. Normally, there could be a helper icon that has a “fix now” button along with what is happening, in an out of view area like the compiler and with the ability to turn it off. A new user will never figure it out and if that’s the case, then the UX test has failed. -
Selecting bones
This happens on all editors in UEFN, but you cannot select a bone from the preview. This is very time consuming and it would be great if there was at least a toggle menu that shows all bones and allows you to select them, instead of painstakingly opening dropdowns and remembering which is the parent of the bone you are looking for.
