UI Experts and Pseudo-Experts: Help!
I’ve started work on the next iteration of ProCon, the online event registration system used by Festival of the LARPs. One of the areas we improved dramatically for last year was the schedules page. It’s not too shabby looking right now:
However, it’s hard to tell at a glance which games have openings, and how many. I’d like to make this easier to use, as well as easier on the eyes. I’ve come up with a mockup:
(Note: the numbers in the mockup are basically the same as the numbers in the above image. Just to show how neutral slots would look, I added 9 neutral slots to “Only Mighty Guests” for the mockup, 2 of which are taken.)
I can’t help but feel like this is still lacking something visually, but I’m not sure how to improve it. If anyone has a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.
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Why have the numbers at all? As a fan of Tufte, I have to point out that the bars themselves communicate sufficient contextual knowledge to the viewer. It would let you shrink the bars by at least half, and keep things clean.
I’d also suggest some sort of graphic for waitlists, perhaps a number of small dots or bullets increasing from left to right as the list grows.
Lastly, you’ve got a lot of wasted space at the bottom of these boxes. Can you bottom-align the room info? That would let you center-align the bars, and then you can slightly increase the title, which besides being the primary piece of information, is also the target for clicking.
To follow up, exact numbers can be shown on the per-game page for the curious. The information is usually so players can know how full a game is to adjust their selection choices, and for GMs to feel better that their game is filling (or alternatively, to despair that it isn’t).