Brainmed UI And Accessibility - Pt 1 of 2

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

This is not a suggestion to revert Brainmed.

There is currently no drop in the average playercount within the department, so an argument to remove brainmed is not to be had here.

This thread is going to focus on one of two elements of our medical system that need to be made more accessible:

The UI,

And the new chemicals.

Chemicals will be addressed in a new thread at a later date.

Here is the data I asked for about playercounts first. There were a few ancedotes from people about how they were not going to play medical anymore and I wanted to see if this was a widespread issue. Thankfully it isn't!

Spoiler

With that said, brainmed has brought a level of complexity to medical and has increased its learning curve, especially when combined with our new chemicals that are loosely based on actual medicines in the real life. It feels entirely intuitive to people who are knowledgeable of baymed as vets or whom enjoy the medical field IRL but it lacks two key elements:

1) At-a-glance knowledge (UI issue)

2) Accessibility (A UI and naming issue)

These are the biggest culprits:

Suit Sensor

Spoiler

The current things players must look for is BP and heart rate.

Pain causes higher heart rate BP drops if blood level drops or heart rate drops it gets high if heart rate gets higher

Our previous advance scanner provided color coded information that gave you immediate and intimate knowledge of damage that was occurring to a players. While this also does that the information can be sometimes difficult to parse to someone with zero knowledge of blood pressure or pulse like me. I have no idea what a health blood pressure range is except that it needs to be below 180/120. Is 119/83 good? What makes it different from 117/74? Is 124/76 fine??? This goes with the pulse - these numbers look fine but they have a wide range. How do I know immediately and intuitively, while ignorant of actual medicine in a real life perspective, that everything is fine?

To provide the same information but remain accessible to people this is what I have roughly put together as an alternative.

 

Spoiler

The main menu of the tracker now provides a better at-a-glance method of presenting information. All information is retained and available but it is consolidated onto a new page. You can skim down the main menu and the computer tells you when a crew member is entering abnormal ranges of BMP/pulse/etc and when they are entering into danger zones. Ideally !!!Critical Alert!!! will also flash to draw further attention.

This color coding continues onto the specific crew members page. Ideally this takes the form of a tool-tip so you can just hover over the [x] and get the information without needing to leave this menu.

This will drastically improve the UI for the tracker. This cuts down on the dense clutter and sheer level of information that is crowded on the main page. No information has been lost. Nothing has been removed or reverted. This is a UI fix.

Advanced Scanner

This device has an atrocious amount of blank space.

 

Spoiler

Compare this developer UI, with its extreme levels of blank space, with the printed version of the same information.

 

Spoiler

The best way of addressing the advanced scanners UI is to trim away all of the blank space. In short, make the computer's version of the same information look like the printed version. However, it would also be ideal if this also included color coding to synergize with the suit tracker and train our players eyeballs to notice these colors and that they mean danger.

Handheld Scanner

The handheld scanner's results blend into the chat with its same issues.

Spoiler

Please also add color coding to it.

Spoiler

Conclusion

It has always been extremely important to me for the past 5 years on staff that we ensure we remain accessible for veteran players as well as day 1 ss13 players. While there is no objective standard that we can measure this by there are still always steps we can take to improve the way we communicate important information to make the experience of using complicated and complex systems like Brainmed as intuitive as possible. While it may seem silly to some, color coding and information presentation are vitally important to UIs.

The best comparison I have is to imagine if all a species' lore was on one page instead of broken up into relevant, different pages, and there was no highlighting, titles, or tables of contents. That's sort of the issue we have here - you'd know where to look and what to look for only if you were already familiar with its layout.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Marlon Phoenix

[Shenaanigans]

I like the idea of adding some more color to the scan results to make identifying problem areas easier, as well as trimming down the empty space on the advanced scanner (because god you're right that scrolling through all of that is eye numbing sometimes), but I feel like the current UI for vitals is actually very simple if you have it explained to you. It already highlights pulse/BP/oxygenation in varying warning colors if they get outside a set range so you don't actually have to be versed in what's a healthy value. Though if you play medical for more than a round or two you'll very quickly memorize those healthy numbers from staring at the UI for so long.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Thank you for your feedback. There is only one thing i will take from it as something i find we can elaborate on.

4 minutes ago, Shenaanigans said:

the current UI for vitals is actually very simple if you have it explained to you.

In how i set it up in the example images its the UI itself that is automatically explaining to you that something is wrong and how severe it is. Its in effect answering LOOC questions from the player immediately within the interface.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Marlon Phoenix

[Shenaanigans]

That's fair. Though there's a learning curve to basically every department so I don't necessarily think that needing a question or two answered about something is necessarily a bad thing. I just enjoy that reading the sensor display takes a little bit of critical thinking, rather than straight out telling you what's wrong with a person, and think monitoring sensors is one of the simplest things in medical to learn how to do.

More color is still fine! I would only point out that the UI already does use a green/orange/red system on pulse and oxygenation to tell you what's within the acceptable range.

[Seeli]

I love these additions. It makes things more user and newbie friendly!

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Oops i broke my own consistency.  On the scanner 'nominal' should be green, and oxygen critical should be red.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Marlon Phoenix

[Skull132]

Thots. Don't do the "!!!" thing, it's a bad way to grab attention. Red is already fine, bolded letters can be used on top of the colour red.

Another point. One colour per line. Or to phrase it another way, there should not be a line which has two non-standard colours. Example being your handheld scanner mock-up.

Duplication information is also a step towards bad design. If you have 3 pieces of information, in the handheld scanner mock-up again, being the number, the colour of the number, and then an assessment. Then one of them is unnecessary. Either remove the number or the verbal assessment. The player is able to understand the colour coding just fine.

Mixing colours is also bad. Implying critical oxygen with the colour blue, instead of red, is suspicious. Though I kinda understand the reasoning for it: to avoid confusion with the rest. But it should hopefully be clear enough? Or maybe change the wording of the line instead.

There's also the thought of having too much colour. IMO having the report of "No limb injuries" be standard black is fine. It's not meant to grab attention, so slamming green there is unnecessary.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

1 hour ago, Skull132 said:

Mixing colours is also bad. Implying critical oxygen with the colour blue, instead of red, is suspicious. Though I kinda understand the reasoning for it: to avoid confusion with the rest. But it should hopefully be clear enough? Or maybe change the wording of the line instead.

There's also the thought of having too much colour. IMO having the report of "No limb injuries" be standard black is fine. It's not meant to grab attention, so slamming green there is unnecessary.

Blue instead of red was a flaw in my mock up.  It should be red.

I disagree with 2 colors per line being poor. It still draws the eye to zero in on what attention is needed on.

Having standard health on the crew tracker being the standard color is fine. On the handheld however i would strongly disagree; it blends into the chat in a very obtuse way.

Edited January 17, 2020 by Marlon Phoenix

[Scheveningen]

Please no yellow text on white background

[Myazaki]

I'll be PRing something along these lines in the next few days. Maybe in parts.

 

Unless someone beats me to it

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Thank you! I am excited to see what you come up with.

[Myazaki]

Check out this PR to argue about colours / tell me I'm bad and should feel bad.

 

Addresses most / all the things from this thread.

[Guest BoxWulf]

3 minutes ago, Myazaki said:

Check out this PR to argue about colours / tell me I'm bad and should feel bad.

 

Addresses most / all the things from this thread.

I’m obsessed, this is great. ❤️

[MoondancerPony]

On 15/01/2020 at 20:31, Marlon Phoenix said:

I have no idea what a health blood pressure range is except that it needs to be below 180/120. Is 119/83 good? What makes it different from 117/74? Is 124/76 fine???

Essentially, what I've been told is that if there's a difference greater than 20 between the top and bottom, you're fine. 117/74 and 124/76 would be kind of worrying but not immediately life-threatening, I think.

That said, as-is, blood pressure is just a proxy for oxygenation. I have a WIP PR that makes it its own thing on the way, which will hopefully work well with the changes by Myazaki. Other than the design issues pointed out by Skull, and some general gripes with the proposed redesign of the suit sensors console (it adds an extra step to viewing specifics about damage types, which is awful for EMTs and paramedics during mass casualty events), this is a pretty solid suggestion.

 

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Since we have an update for this in the works can this be archived?

[Butterrobber202]

On 21/01/2020 at 21:04, Myazaki said:

Check out this PR to argue about colours / tell me I'm bad and should feel bad.

 

Addresses most / all the things from this thread.

Can we make the scan be a pop out so we can stare  at it without it getting pushed up into the abyss 

[Myazaki]

22 minutes ago, Butterrobber202 said:

Can we make the scan be a pop out so we can stare  at it without it getting pushed up into the abyss 

I'll put it on my to-do list.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

2 hours ago, Myazaki said:

I'll put it on my to-do list.

You have 12 hours.