Topic: Button "next" in Building window

I do not think it is a great idea to add information about all buildings into the window of a specific building. Also the "go to next/prev" does not belong into a specific building imho. It is a property of your whole country. The building window already has a lot of buttons to understand, if you now overload it's context with global state, it becomes even harder to understand.

IMHO, the right solution is to make the building statistics menu more useful and easier to open and navigate. Suggestions and mockups for this would be welcome :).

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I second kaputtnik - it is about usability, but his suggestion "Make a button on the buildingswindow which open the building statistic window and point directly to the corresponding building" is also worth considering...

Yet a question - if we have there arrows go to previous/next one, also the window itself will be changed so that it will belong to that previous/next building?

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Could you explain "global state"? I am not sure what this mean.

With global state i mean state that is not local. With local state I mean the state that is particular to the current building. I.e. the productivity of one brewery is local to this brewery, so are the wares and workers that are currently inside this brewery. The number of brewerys and their average productivity is global state. Currently the building window only deals with local state - with the exception of the "help" button, which connects local state to the global help; I see this as a kind of hyperlink to ease navigation. I see it as a bug that there is no other way right now to get to this help, but we will address that with the new help system.

Also the "go to next/prev" does not belong into a specific building imho. It is a property of your whole country.

In my opinion its not a question about property, it is a question of usability. Don't know if i play widelands wrong, but i get often in a situation, where i want to quickly(!) switch to another building of the same type.

We want the same :). UX is defined by how easy it is to find a feature, understand a feature, and use a feature. I agree that the feature you suggest (moving to next buildings quickly) is important and should be addressed. I am just arguing that the building window is the wrong place to implement the feature. My argument is that it might be easy to find there (it is in your face with the buttons), but it is making the window as a whole more confusing: it mixes global and local state (see below). The mixing becomes even worse when you add in average statistics for all buildings as was proposed earlier.

Some examples:

• Warehouse gets ready: Mostly i want to store some specific wares (most the wares to build buildings) or soldiers in the new warehouse. After i make the common tasks, i want to change the settings in an older warehouse (Do not store those wares and soldiers)
• Quarry/fisherhut gets out of Ressources: Then i want to check the other Quarrys/fisherhuts.
• Military buildings: If i enlarge my country i want to store fewer soldiers in earlier builded military buildings or want to dismantling those
• check all lumberjacks if they have enough trees to cut
• etc.

I agree these use cases are all important.

Because i want this quickly, i don't want to use the buildings statistic menu. Therefore i have to scroll around the country and sometimes its like finding a needle in a haystack Or i have to remember where those buildings are, and in my age this could be hard

The real problem here is that you do not want to use the building statistics menu. Why? I argue because it is hard to open and use. The functionality you want is already implemented - but it is in a "far away menu" (i.e. needs a lot of clicks). And this menu is hard to use (the list is too long and hard to navigate). The first issue can be addressed by making the window open on a hotkey. The second issue needs redesigning of the menu - which is overdue. I believe the list is a bad idea and instead having the buildings in tabs and in the same order as in the build menu will help. The numbers could be displayed as 4 (+1) (you own 4 and 1 more is being build). Productivity can be displayed as (min%, mean%, max%). All of these numbers could be made clickable to cycle through the buildings that match (i.e. pressing min% will cycle through all buildings that have a red (i.e. low) productivity). I also like your idea of adding a button to the window menu that opens the building statistics menu with the current building type (and the cycle state on the current building, so that any click gets you to the next) - like the help button this is a kind of "link" to the display of global state, not the state itself.

I would love to see a mock for this suggestion.

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kaputtnik wrote:

with the exception of the "help" button, which connects local state to the global help;

In build 18 i do not have such a button.

Some Barbarian buildings do, e.g. the Lumberjack's hut. A lot has changed since build18, so comparing to build18 doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. Can you try getting a current nightly build?

The functionality you want is already implemented - but it is in a "far away menu" (i.e. needs a lot of clicks).

Yes, too many clicks and time to find the wanted building.

I will try to make a mockup containing your ideas the next days.

Thanks

Busy indexing nil values

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I think we could completely get away from the list object here. Think about having a box for each building and what you could do with it. This would use up more vertical space to scroll, but we wouldn't get the problem of having a very wide window.

Busy indexing nil values

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