One of the issues that I consistently run into is attempting to direct my civilian transport of installations. This thread is my thoughts on ways that could improve the user experience.
** Note – I am not a UX or design guy by trade, so all of this is from a User perspective, not a “good design philosophy” perspective (probably). Also I’m not fully cognizant under what limitations you are working under that are inherent in the way the app is built, so some may be impossible.
The Demand / Supply installation type selector dropdown and the buttons that interact with the option chosen in the dropdown should be together (and/or combined) so that it is simpler to navigate without confusion.
With the dropdowns at the top, and the buttons to add/edit/delete orders are at the bottom, resulting in (for me) consistent mis-clicks where I choose something in the wrong dropdown. It may be likely that this is an issue impacting only me, and using the function more will build the muscle memory to not choose wrong, but it is frustrating. As a user, it is not clear why there are two dropdowns AND two sets of buttons (technical limitation?), but it seems to me this could be one dropdown and the supply/demand orders are assigned appropriately based on the button clicked.
There should be an indicator of Empire-Wide open and unassigned supply/demand orders on this page, with a total for each type so that I can easily understand empire wide supply/demand.
Even if it becomes messy breaking it down by body, at least by installation type would be very helpful. Maybe something like a togglable radio button in case it becomes too noisy with a giant empire, and that’d be consistent with other improvements. I didn’t realize how helpful this would be until I used Aurora Electrons and they had an indicator of when you have more supply than demand or vice versa, and the open supply / demand orders.
There should be a simple pathway to add all installations of a type on a given body to the Supply list so that it is quicker to setup civilian orders.
My suggestion is a button to Max Supply or All Supply - as an additional button next to Add Supply or in the confirmation window for Add Supply that will add the current total for the selected body of the selected type of installation as a Supply order, without having to type in the entire number (which for infra can get repetitive to type in all the decimals each time). Basically, if I have 9624.21 Infra on recently terraformed CC0 Mars, I can select Infra from the dropdown and click Max Supply and 3 clicks and zero typing later it is now available for use elsewhere.
There should be a clear indicator of how much Infra is required to hit max pop at min/current/max CC so that I don’t need to manually calculate infra requirements.
On the Civilians / Flags or on the Summary page (Both?) an indicator of how much infrastructure required to hit Population Capacity at the min/current/max CC would be very nice. The necessary data is there on the Summary page, but it requires some manual math to get a “I need to ship X infrastructure here” number.
[edited to use headings so this thing is more readable. Sorry still getting used to discourse]