A suggested redesign for Maya's user interface

[badbrush]

Hi,

Since I am very interested in UI-Design I invested some time to overpaint a screenshot of maya to suggest some possible improvements in its graphical user interface.

You may read a VERY detailed description of the changes here:
http://www.pixtur.de/text_maya_redesign.eng.htmlhttp://www.pixtur.de/text\_maya\_redesign.eng.html

I would be very happy about any comments or critiques about my suggestions.

The 1st overpaint:
http://www.pixtur.de/img_text2/hires/01-overpaint.pnghttp://www.pixtur.de/img\_text2/hires/01-overpaint.png

The updated overpaint:
http://www.pixtur.de/img/text_maya/hires/01-overpaint.pnghttp://www.pixtur.de/img/text\_maya/hires/01-overpaint.png

EDIT: See updated version below!

the original screen-shot:
http://www.pixtur.de/img_text2/hires/01-overpaint_org.pnghttp://www.pixtur.de/img\_text2/hires/01-overpaint\_org.png

[joojaa]

Very fun but whats with all the extra eye candy. I mean most of the time i tend to want to decrease the amount instead of increasing it. Usualy a new cool iterface is fun for a week or so.

Because a it slows things down, not realy an issue but anyway. Secondly it is there to enhance your workflow, not to hanper it and confuse the user.

Also color coding isnt all that good either (humans ara unusualy bad at remembering color coding data! Yet still some people insist on doing it).

Most of this can allready be done in maya if you are indutrious enoug. But ive nevertheless implmented ateast some of your idea allready years ago in my default ui. But what realy is my biggest question is while you did all this effort why didnt you change the ui. After all its just mel code.

The dafault maya ui even with some of its shortcommings is allready, one pr4etty darn good ui.

[badbrush]

Hi Joojaa,

thank you for the fast answere. These are some harsh words...

I perfectly agree about eyecandy. I normaly turn off as much as possible. For an interface workflow is the most important issue. But it's not its only purpose. Understanding the meaning of the controls can be important too: After some tries I perfectly learned, what the incomming connecticon symbol stands for. But if it would be placed on the left side, there would be nothing to learn. It would be obvious that the attribute is controlled from somewhere else.

You are right about the color-coding. Using white type on red background is esp. bad for color-blind people (5% of males).

About customizing Maya with MEL: Actually I know some MEL and already wrote some configuration-scripts for my own. Perhaps I did not dig deep enough. Do you know, where to get additional information about MEL-UI (beyond the maya-documentation)?

And I also agree your last point: Maya already has a damn good interface. I love maya. But I think it could be better. I didn't want to argue about taste. It's subjective. So I don't really care about corners being round or titles being red.

tom

[deke-kincaid]

For the attrib editor and channel box, its just way too much color that adds too much confusion. There are allready a million buttons in maya, adding color is just going to confuse the issue. There is too many places to focus on and your eye is going to look around too much. I find your adjustments just cosmetic pretty stuff, but not really better for usability. Sometimes less is more and I believe being more monocromatic is better in this situation. Also I don't like the little close buttons for stuff in the channel box, it adds too many clicks. Currently you just click on a different name and it pops up the controlls, but your way you have to physically close each one when you dont want to see it, especially if you have too many in the list. It's like having pop up windows in apps, really annoying when you have to close a window.

Layers: cool making it look like photoshop. The icon is a little more recognizable.

Outliner: do we really need another place to change attributes, isnt that what the attrib editor and channel box are for. I think this adds a little too much to it.

Shelves: I don't like your shelf or alias's, which is why I never use it. It takes up too much space. Your new one takes up even more. I think the buttons for it should be the same size as the ones on the "status line". The rounded buttons dont do anything for me, again, just more cosmetic stuff that doesn't make a difference to usability.

I really like your suggestions for the hypershade inside the graph area. A nice combo of the the xsi and maya. I think this should go even further to having the Hypershade and hypergraph as the same window(like houdini). Since you can graph anything in the hypershade that you can in the hypergraph. I don't like the left side, again, too much going on, KISS(Keep it simple stupid) .

You have some cool ideas, but you really need to rely on more KISS stuff. Your making thing more complex then they need to be. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.

[joojaa]

Yes read all thats uncder maya/scripts folder. It pretty much has it all there. OK so its a loong list of reading so start with somethihng rather elemantary like the wievport menus wich is in createModelPanelMenu.mel you can then copy it to your own scripts folder (leaving the original intact), and make some changes to that file to se wat affects what. Now when you restart maya your wievport manus are changed.

This said its not so easy to decipher someone elses code.

[badbrush]

Hi Beaker,

thanks for this reply. You gave me some very good hints:

Attribute-Editor: I already know, that the red color and the high contrast is contra-productive. I will give it a 2nd try.
- I did not want to place any "close-buttons there".
- The sidebar might seem unhandy. A single click should shade each of it. All new sidewindows (Transforms etc.) would be hidden as default. And they stay closed until you open them. I don't see where the extra-clicks come from. I hate pop-ups and don't want to have them in this design.

Outliner: The idear came from mayas two expand-icons, if attributes are visible. I just thought, "if maya already shows the attributes, why not show their current values."

Shelf: The height of the suggested shelfs is actually two pixels smaller and handles 1 more icon. (I removed some borders). Nobody would be forced to use shelf, but there are many who uses them.
I don't really care, if the shelt-tabs are rounded or not. BUT the active tab have to look different.

Hypershade: Good point. Maybe it's still too much.

"KISS" "KISS" "KISS". That's excactly my intention. Maybe I will further simplify some of the suggestions.

tom

[joojaa]

I never keep the shelf tabs visible and whan screen estate starts to be a problem you can in fact make the shelf button smaller if you so wish! Aldso i have filled the toolbox so that its cerammed with buttons so i dont waste that space. Also if screenspace estate is aproblem kill the tile bar gives you a few pixels (about 10pix it can be done from the prefs) Also killing menus is aone sure way to get some space too. (you can allways acces them thru space so...)

[angu]

I really don't mind color-coding. I'm used to it from other programs (most editing and such) and I actually like it, but the colors you're using a lot of the time are too harsh. The rose you used in the attribute editor I think works well, but the glaring red on the channelbox and such is too much.

I like the photoshop-y look of the layers, that works well and the soft colors you had in the outliner were nice as well.

As for the tab bar shrugs I ditch that thing as a standard. The hotbox is the main thing I use, cause the more I can clear off the screen the better. Same goes for the toolbox, so you could make those neon green and I won't know. lol

The timeline bar is an interesting idea, seems like it could save me a few hundred times of opening the graph editor (you think I'd just leave it open, but no, that would take forethought).

The Hypershader I think works well with showing where the i/o is connecting but I'd rather it was togglable so that when I don't need it I don't have to look at it. I'm also not a fan of the curvy lines. Maybe something that goes straight and angles (like Inspiration does). The color shifts of the connectors are cool too, but again, making them togglable sounds best. Oh, and way up at the top, having all those buttons lit up would get to me quick.

The ideas are cool, I just think some of them need toned down a bit. Sometimes this got a bit too cluttered looking.

[joojaa]

Color coding is plain bad bacuse the psychological reaction for color coding is zero. The probblem is that humans are terrible in remebering what color signifies what,instead humans remeber what is where. A pattern on other otherhand is much better. (we can remeber a specific set of color coding, nameley we can identify 7 colors, however what the colors mean and what they are connected to ise pretty different depending on the culture same goes to icons shaped like V and X, and O*)

So if you intend to do color coding be sure to know this, humans can be taught to learn it but its nothing that goes naturaley and so it gets in your learning curve. Also the info is realy fast to be discared.

Also a logical grouping shouldnt for the same kind of psychological reasoning exceed 7 items! Its just how our brain works.

*The coolest thing is all those apps that use a green V and red X now for me they clobber up two opposite meanings. And its realy bad because for a japaneese even the color signifies the thing wrong way around not to mention the shapes. So just atof culttural courtessy would be nice not to use theese things. Offourse any self resepecting UI designer knows all this.

[sventhors]

Funny that I have just about to take an examination about some of the matters mentioned here.

---

Color coding is plain bad bacuse the psychological reaction for color coding is zero. The probblem is that

---

Care to elaborate on that a bit more? What do you mean by zero?

---

humans are terrible in remebering what color signifies what,instead humans remeber what is where. A pattern on other otherhand is much better. (we can remeber a specific set of color coding, nameley we can identify 7 colors,

---

There is a difference between identifying and recoqnising colors. As far as I know, it holds that we are able to name relatively few colors, but able recognize and differentiate something like 12-17 different colors (by Paul Khan). Colin Ware says on page 135 in "Information Visualization" that approximately 5-10 color codes can be used to categorize information. On the same page he lists 12 suitable colors for color coding.

I do't think that UI is using colors _instead_ of, say, buttons but _with_ them to enhance the perception.

---

So if you intend to do color coding be sure to know this, humans can be taught to learn it but its nothing that goes naturaley and so it gets in your learning curve. Also the info is realy fast to be discared.

---

But, at least at times, color is not intended to give you 'meaning' but to separate and organize/categorize items. As such, it is a powerfull tool and is in fact used widely, including medical images and even in XSI.

---

Also a logical grouping shouldnt for the same kind of psychological reasoning exceed 7 items! Its just how our brain works.

---

No, referring to what I wrote earlier, the limit is not 7. While it may be semantics if it is between 5-15, it still has a lot of potential, showing for example states of the program. And if you need something like 256 states, color might not be your best option.

Of course things can be done badly, but to say something as absurd that "color coding is plain bad"...

[mikedin]

After reading the posts above that were generally against your UI design I wanted to say that I believe the ability to expand the Oultliner shape and transform nodes and view and edit thevalues Is a great idea. I'm always switching to AttrEditor and Channels and such and after a scene is basically in place and you need to refine a bit this would allow you to quickly make adjustments without reducing your work area via Channel box and attrEditor. Same goes for the Hypershade where you can get at a nodes basic adjustments without "opening" up the whole UI just for it.

Also I personally believe work would and could be done faster by showing upstream and downstream connections via left and right visual inputs per node and quicker to find problems with.

One thing that has always bugged me about Maya is how the Outliner depicts Parent Child relationships via the skinny attachment line from Parent to child. I wish it was "indented" to more clearly define this like MAX and Windows OS for that matter.

But my all time biggest wish is to be able to scroll through the attrEditor by dragging in an area not having a field or text and be able to accelerate this with cntrl and alt (Came from MAX). Oops one more which I'm not alone in is being able to tear of menus with the hotbox like the pull downs. I loathe pull down menus but sometimes they are req'd just so you can tear of a menu. I learned an almost cool tip that if you open the hotbox by hitting space_bar and keep holding it down while pressing the alt key; after you release the hotbox will stay up on screen. Unfornately this is basically useless as it doesn't allow you to navigate the options more than once before disappearing and ya can't tear of a menu here. This would be however the perfect place to institute the above requested functionality.

Nice work though,

[deke-kincaid]

Oops one more which I'm not alone in is being able to tear of menus with the hotbox like the pull downs. I loathe pull down menus but sometimes they are req'd just so you can tear of a menu.

What's really weird is that the OSX version of maya allows you to do this, but not any other version. Maybe it's something special in the apple ui toolkit that allows this, no idea though.

One thing I would like to see is dynamic scaling of Attribute editor. I think it could be alot thinner and still hold all the information that it has in it. There is alot of wasted space in there in the width of the window. They could actually get rid of the sliders on the side of the input box and put them inside the input window, like shake does. It's this little mini green slider. Works perfect and takes up very little space.

[joojaa]

I dont mean maya couldnt do with a n overhaul in how it looks. Im just overly critical.

Yes but if you use color coding just to signify grouping then you could use other not so visualy offensive methods too. Its usualy a good thing to keep the ui as visualy in-offensive as possible. Also color coding dont need to be a big red or yellow slab adding a small blue red or green icon color sceheme is enough to keep it coherrent. The status line sortof tries this but in my oppinion fails due to the blue clolor in curve snap.

Yes but asuming 5-15 then it be better to use something closer to 5 because of this. And yes ive read the same book. Others too. But naminga a color and remebering it is a different thing... However humans are quite good at dicerning differences between 2 colors, if they are adjacent to each other.

Color can enhance some perception but not all the time. So its better to think in terms of color less than to that color will be a great idea. Usualy something darker and brighter from the base color is enough. Or slight hue change.

7 in halfway between 5-15, 7 is also the numebr most people can come to without actulay counting the number of items (the ide abehind this is taht they asume it is a gaussian distribution, it however might not be). But there are some individual differences.

But the bottom line is that color coding in fact is worse than most of us care to think.

Remeber the ui is something we stare all day long. One reason why gray and blue would be ideal.

But yeah you could use some 128 or more hues of a color if theres a way to compare it! especilay if it was something where you need just dicern change from the neibour.

people are however more content if not balsted with more than a few colors. Colors can irritate, send wrong signals... and different to different people. Having 4 diferrently colored regions on screen doesent make you more happy than if they all were tha same color.

Be a bit carefull with color, we know a lot about how to do it bad but quite little on how to do it good. I mean a red cancel and green ok doesnt realy that much impact usability. Just adds clutter.

Oh and by the way the default maya uses something around 5-15 color codes all the time. So adding to the list isnt going to help. Buyt yeah they are a bit subtle. Maybe the coding could be made more coherrent!

Some note to other posts:

You can actualy adjust how fast a slider works, if you open a atribute editor and hit control down when a mouse is over a numeric field then the field changes a different speed depending on wich mouse button you use!

More info in graphs is a bit problematic on many levells whatever the case it still needs to be toggleable on off. I mean i have so complex connections some time that theres absolutely nothing one can do to make it clearer. Adding this would jsut mess it up even more because there woul be no way it fits my screens.

And yeah the atribute editor needs to be more scaleable! I agree. especilay if you use it docked. (it by the way is scaleble as we speak, just not when its docked to the ui! but its easily fixed). Il look into it so i might finaly stop having it float around. Text could scale as well.

Along this line it would be great if the text in the tabs would also change side instead of nurbsSphereShape1 ut could read nurbsSp.Sh.1 on some logic, thisway more tabs would be visible with tooltips for the true name eg?

[joojaa]

PS. oh i forgot you can also adust the speed of how fast the middle mouse works whan using channelbox sliding with middle mouse by pressing control (for slow, and shift for fast). So that request is allready handled by maya.

[sventhors]

---

dont mean maya couldnt do with a n overhaul in how it looks. Im just overly critical.

---

I'm not saying anything about the UI redesign, current one works for me well enough, but hey, if it can be made even better I don't mind at all.

---

Yes but if you use color coding just to signify grouping then you could use other not so visualy offensive methods too. Its usualy a good thing to keep the ui as visualy in-offensive as possible.

---

Well, I'm not quite following the reasoning why using colors is offensive. You just say they are and speak about how they have different meanings in different cultures when that is not the point in typical use of colors in visualization (something that UI is, among other things of course). Again, I totally agree with the idea that UI should be in-offensive.

Now, given examples from Mayas "Select by component" which turns to orange once you have incomplete subset. Is this done badly to your taste? How would it be made better without using color? Or identifying selected vertices on a mesh in viewports? Or How about XSIs keyframes (though I also have mixed feelings about this)? Or function curves? What would be a better way to do it?

I am sure there can be better ways, but why don't you give an example?

---

Also color coding dont need to be a big red or yellow slab adding a small blue red or green icon color sceheme is enough to keep it coherrent. The status line sortof tries this but in my oppinion fails due to the blue clolor in curve snap.

---

I was not speaking for the given example. So, with this I'm not giving any opinions about the matter. And even now you're speaking positively about color coding even if it's the mother of all evil?

---

Yes but asuming 5-15 then it be better to use something closer to 5 because of this.

---

Well, given that I have seen cases where one gets away with as many as 12, I would say it's really hard to give fixed rules, don't you think? Without actually knowing the exact use and situation?

---

And yes ive read the same book. Others too. But naminga a color and remebering it is a different thing... However humans are quite good at dicerning differences between 2 colors, if they are adjacent to each other.
--

I totally agree with this one too, my bad with english (naming <> remembering). Thought you ment naming.

---

But the bottom line is that color coding in fact is worse than most of us care to think.

---

Given the examples before, I would say quite the opposite. Just that many don't seem to understand the extent of color coding / use of colors.

---

Remeber the ui is something we stare all day long. One reason why gray and blue would be ideal.

---

Oh, I do remember that, worry not. And I'm not questioning greys and blues, in fact I don't recall saying anything about specific colors.

---

But yeah you could use some 128 or more hues of a color if theres a way to compare it! especilay if it was something where you need just dicern change from the neibour.

---

And those are used, in medical images for example. But, on UI, I can't think that very practical. Could be wrong though, and who know, there might be a special case in which it makes perfect sense.

---

Be a bit carefull with color, we know a lot about how to do it bad but quite little on how to do it good. I mean a red cancel and green ok doesnt realy that much impact usability. Just adds clutter.

---

Well, I'm not sure if you refer to my post or in the original redesign. But, again this is an example of colors that have meaning and, yes, clutter. But there are many good uses too, even in maya, not to mention many other programs. And, it's not only limited to computers, we have subway system maps (like in London) that makes extensive uses of color, and quite well in my opinion.

---

Oh and by the way the default maya uses something around 5-15 color codes all the time. So adding to the list isnt going to help. Buyt yeah they are a bit subtle. Maybe the coding could be made more coherrent!

---

I'm not talking about adding anything to this list! I'm just saying that there is a place and use for color coding in _some_ cases. That color coding in general is not automaticly a bad idea. And I am not saying Maya doesn't use color coding, in fact you're right that it does, which in my opinion says 2 cents about how they (developers) have seen the importance of it.

[badbrush]

Oh wow!

a lot of traffic is going on. It

[joojaa]

Right, yes icons can have certain colors and that can help recongnize the icon (but here its not color coding per se its icon recognition, offcourse its some kind of color code), but using too many colors confuses the user. Having red bars indeed is a bad idea! But this si widly different from having colored windows, now it uses a different part of the brain (if you use the same yellow on a nother shape it doesnet trigger the effect)

Also, you should stick with a set nubmber of colors, so the color codes or whatever you use or dont use (lets face it maya ui is color coded), means that you either need to recolor tham all or stick with that. OK enough on the subject from me.

Outliner isnt very clever but i use a hotkey to toggle it up and back wich kindof makes using it much better (thetway it wastes no screenspace*). But yes it should scroll with aly middle button. This is the worst thing there is to it. Alotugh selecting a object on screen hitting f will send outliner finding that object (cvastly increasing the usage speed)!

Ok why doesnt the help line tell you about the middle mouse option. Well its because its a kindof bonus function since you can have a tool on wich offcourse makes its own help notes, and the middlemouse channel change is an addition function on top of that. Same goes to control sliding in other windows, you cant expect maya to allways prompt tis especialy whan the boxes themselves have that info. But god they could make a page for this in the help.

Well avbout yellow green red and blue... they kindof work fine for western people but they have wildy different meanings in china, india, japan and africa. (green actualy signifies the opposite as it does for us for a few hundred million people, wich was what i hinted to you eralier.)

Also the rgb colors match R=X G=Y B=Z because they are ordered in same manner. Xyz versus rgb. But again its not so ovious.

Example of a relatively normal network. it easily gets more complex than this, its s slight modify of subsurface ilmmun script by pixho. Theres absolutely nothing that makes this clear, then suppose i layermanualy a few shaders fro the final effect and its not so intelligent anumre except in my concept decription. Note usualy one would map a wee bit more channels than in this example:

*
global proc outlinerWinToggle()
{//could be improved to hold a own copy of outliner if needed
if ( window -exists outlinerPanel1Window )
deleteUI -window outlinerPanel1Window;
else
tearOffPanel "Outliner" "outlinerPanel" false;
}

[badbrush]

I adjusted the colors and further refined the channelbox:

http://www.pixtur.de/pub/overpaint_v3.pnghttp://www.pixtur.de/pub/overpaint\_v3.png

I also spent some time on the "compressed" attribute-editor. I personally would use it, but it's a little bit too tight. It can only be an alternative to sliders:

http://www.pixtur.de/pub/attribute_editor_narrow.pnghttp://www.pixtur.de/pub/attribute\_editor\_narrow.png

About the shader-network. I am sure that this could be show much better by the suggested shader-network-displays. It might still be hard to understand, but it definately would be clearer, because you could distinguish between "LayerShaders" and "normal" blinns etc. Of course you can build up shading-networks that are hard to understand. But would they not be an even better reason for improving the current hypershade-visualisation?! It wouldn't matter if shown with "Curvers" or "Lines". There is a lot of pontential for improving the hypershader.

Thanks about the "outliner"-script. I mentioned my "CTRL+Space"-script, which hides anything but the current model-view. Same problem, similar solution. God bless mel.

{
global int $my_all_hidden;
if($my_all_hidden==1){
print "// restoren";
print ("hidden="+$my_all_hidden+"n");
$my_all_hidden=0;
restoreMainWindowComponents;
}
else {
print "// hiden";
$my_all_hidden=1;
setAllMainWindowComponentsVisible 0;
}
}

[joojaa]

I never use layered shaders to anything. They dont provide any benefits over say a blend node or plus minus average summed one (in fact it gives me far less controll).

[user_deleted]

About color coding in Maya:
First of all I'm not an UI expert, and couldn't be bothered to configure all the colors available in Maya.

Someone should make a file format to export and import color configuration in Maya, that way I could download them and try it out, pick the one I like.

BTW Thomas Mann has done excellent job at reconfiguring these maya UI elements, he has put in a lot of effort. And this would make an excellent excersize for any UI/HCI courses.