User Experience / User Interface

[c_r_w]

Hi Lone Wolf,

The technical accomplishment that is Hero Lab is astounding. The improvements over PCGen and the offical WotC 4e builder are laudable and frankly amazing.

That said, in general, the user experience / user interface, especially the new user experience, is a bit rough. When I look at your upcoming feature list, it does not include improvements to the user experience. I would strongly suggest considering UX a feature of your product.

I would start with the new user experience. The first ten-to-thirty minutes of using your product are tough on a new user. The whole licensing / update process needs to be streamlined and simplified. This should work like Google Chrome, where it just tells me when I need to restart to apply an update. Getting from choosing the system, to opening or starting a new character just needs fewer or clearer steps. The interface could probably benefit from dropping the skeuomorphic textures as well.

Next I would clean up and simplify the source file licensing catalog (this is on your web page). The source file catalog is a static list of two-liners and prices that has no navigation assistance, filtering, searching, etc. Theoretically, this is where people spend their money, it should be a place that is exciting to go check out. As it is it is a bit of a scary wall of text. I know making better marketplace and shopping experience is a tall order, but I have to believe it would help sales. Right now I buy the bare minimum I need to get the job done, with a better, more understandable marketplace I might buy modules just to play around with them.

Cleaning up these areas to start would be a huge leap forward. The actual character design experience is surprising good. Data presentation could be better but I can hardly complain compared to the above. However, it is so difficult to actually get to the character design experience, we had to sit down and force other players to use Hero Lab. No one wanted to pay for the demo because of the above experience problems. Once they get into character design, it is fine.

Don't mean to be negative, I just think if you could improve the new user experience, there would be a big upside for Hero Labs adoption.