Unity Editor Theme Survey - Second Iteration

jcsolis

Hi everyone,

As you might have seen in previous threads or presentations, we’re in the process of evolving the Unity Editor UX. This is a long term effort which will be released in multiple phases and driven by these goals:

Quality: We want to provide Unity users with a modern, professional software offering that is capable, trustworthy, and well-maintained.

Familiarity: The Unity user experience should align to the Unity brand while maintaining familiarity with other DCC software.

Accessibility: The Unity user interface should be accessible to a wider range of users and support a wider range of abilities.

Improved Usability: We want to help users create content and complete tasks more efficiently by offering a clearer, more legible interface, visual hierarchy, and streamlined workflows.

As we’re getting closer to release the first phase of this initiative, we’re working hard at fixing small issues and at making sure we provide a great user experience based on your previous feedback.

We invite you to try this new build and share your feedback with us. We want to remind you that this is a work in progress, and we’re still iterating based on your input. Thank you for taking the time to try this prototype and share your thoughts.

Here’s how to proceed:

• Download and install the prototype.
• Install your extensions.
• Explore the prototype.
• We encourage you to use it for at least an hour, in common scenarios.
• Fill out this survey to tell us about your experience relative to the goals. This shortened survey should only take 10-15 minutes to complete.

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Lt_Commander

Legibility wise, it's a great improvement. Here are a few things I'd really love from the UI, having worked daily with it for the past few years:

• Very clear window lock icons. The current ones are an improvement, but many people on the team didn't even know you could lock inspectors for years, and even today I get burned when I forget to unlock an inspector and edit the same thing twice.
• Traditional back and forward buttons for inspectors and project windows. My current workspace spans multiple monitors and at any given time I can have half a dozen inspectors locked because a single click on a child prefab will cause me to 'loose' the last thing I was working with. A traditional per-inspector back/forward button would substantially change my workflow and lighten the load on our internal tools developers.

For reference, this is my daily setup:

Notice the 6 inspectors and 5 project explorers over three windows. This doesn't include the second instance I usually have in the top corner that runs a server clone or second workspace.

• Word wrap on thumbnails in the project window. A good chunk of our assets don't have unique names until the 10th or so character, and it can be confusing as to which object I'm selecting until I bring it into scene. I prefer thumbnails over list view because of the...
  
• High performance costs of the inspector 3d preview. Sometimes selecting a complex prefab can literally grind the editor to a halt as the preview tends to take lighting from the scene, which in many cases might not even have lights and be completely black/useless.
• Thumbnail previews for 3d objects, while we are on the subject, are often victim  to the momentary scene conditions as well. There are many scenarios where I edit a prefab and the thumbnail breaks because I save the edit in a scene with no lighting. Also being able to specify the layers thumbnails use to generate the previews would be great, as we have a lot of overlapping geo that use shaders that need world space info, which makes a lot of our thumbs mostly useless.
• Move the 2D button away from the lighting button? This one is more personal preference but every time I intend to toggle lighting and accidentally hit the 2D button I get a good three seconds to mull over my mistake while I wait for the editor to switch modes. 
• 'Move to view' and 'align with view' would be nice UI buttons to have as well, I use those extensively when placing cameras and lights but not often enough to memorize the hotkeys.
• Better ordered/grouped lists in the gizmos menu. I rarely toggle anything because I have a hard time finding the object in the scene I want to turn off.

There are more things I could prattle on about, but this is the meat of my UI pressure points. Thanks for looking for feedback!

jcsolis

@Lt_Commander Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts! Your feedback is super valuable. By any chance, were you able to participate in the survey as well?

Lt_Commander

I did!

jcsolis

@Lt_Commander Awesome. Thanks again!