Overview
The menu was one of the worst bits of tech from the first iteration of Virtual Viking. The old menu was cluttered, difficult to navigate, and often broken. (I will include a brief recording of it below) Consequently, the menu overhaul is one of my most significant contributions over the past few years. This project aimed to create a feature-complete, attractive, and user-friendly UI for course selection. More than that, it needed to be user-friendly for the elderly and technically illiterate and easy to update in the future. We identified the following issue with the old menu.
Problems
> Cluttered appearance caused confusion
> Multiple pages caused confusion
> Lack of visual appeal
> Inconsistent tag system
> Arrow scroll method functioned inconsistently
> History feature hiding courses unessecarily
> Multiple pages caused confusion
> Lack of visual appeal
> Inconsistent tag system
> Arrow scroll method functioned inconsistently
> History feature hiding courses unessecarily
Solutions:
> Created to match the UI artist's design
> Simplified UI aesthetic and functionality
> Single-panel design
> Rebuilt tag system
> Tag system auto-populates based on data table
> Menu contents auto-populate based on data table
> Eliminated the history feature
> Added "click to scroll" functionality in VR
> Simplified UI aesthetic and functionality
> Single-panel design
> Rebuilt tag system
> Tag system auto-populates based on data table
> Menu contents auto-populate based on data table
> Eliminated the history feature
> Added "click to scroll" functionality in VR
Overall, I am quite proud of how the menu turned out. It is a world away from what we had previously, and I think it stands well on its own. It has made VirtualViking significantly more user-friendly.
Old Menu