Just so you know a few of my concerns with the current one I'll briefly list them.
• The original login area will not work, as it attempts to put too much into such a small space. When transitioning from the "login" to "logged in" views, it's hard to match the sizes as much more content is displayed in the former than the latter. In addition to that several things are left out. Specifically the "logged in" view, and where we will have a profile selector for users to switch accounts or login to a new one. Another thing is that we should have links like "forgot password" and "register/buy minecraft" which redirect you to Mojang's sites. There should additionally be some sort of disclaimer on the login area that says something along the lines of "We are not affiliated with Mojang AB or Microsoft" and then something additional which reassures users we arent stealing their login data.
• The news page should not be directly loaded anymore. I've mentioned before that we can give this launcher a more native look and feel if we embed the news articles by constructing our own news area. The content of the news articles will be provided by a RSS feed, which the enjin news module has. You can see that here
http://www.westeroscraft.com/api/rss.php?preset_id=12700544
• There are no progress bars on the original design and I have no idea where to put them. Are we going for the same type of thing as the current launcher where we have multiple progress bars, or shall we settle for only one? Should the progress bars be hid away on some tab or should it be always present? Personally, I would prefer it to be always present. The fundamental purpose of the launcher is to download the game and mods for you, so it seems natural.
• The settings menu design provided before is very barebones and frankly I'm not a huge fan of it. It seems crammed into one small area and the design isn't very modern. For example, take a look at how discord displays its settings menu. That's much nicer to look at and navigate. We need to come up with a new layout for ours.
• The mod selection view has no design currently. This is the part of the UI where users can select which mods to enable/disable if we list them as optional on the distribution index. I plan on having this be a more prevalent feature of this launcher because we can do some cool things by providing "extra mods" to the index and having them disabled by default. As an example, many people want to use shaders on the server but it's a MASSIVE headache to install them by yourself. Instead, we can simply put the shaders mod on our index and disable it by default. Therefore if a user wants to enable shaders they can go to this part of the UI and click a checkbox next to "shaders" (or something fancier than a checkbox, we still need the design xD). From there, shaders is enabled and it took them no time to setup, a direct contrast to our current launcher where if you want shaders you better be ready to build our modpack fresh on the vanilla launcher to coerce optifine into loading it.
• We have no idea how the animations on the launcher should look. As a very basic example, how should the buttons look when they are hovered over? When they are clicked? The current design does not give insight into this, among other things. Ideally we should know how each aspect should look when it's interacted with.
• Server selection area on the current design will not work. When I first got the design last fall I did not know how we save server configurations so I thought it would be fine. It's actually not, and I'll explain it plainly so you can see the issue. The launcher has no control over which servers are showed, it looks to our distribution index for instructions. Each server listed there is displayed by the launcher. The current design has only enough space for two server configurations. If a third is sent to the launcher, where would it go? If only one is on the launcher, there will be a large gap. We need an area that can display an indefinate number of servers. This can be done in a number of ways. The most basic would be a dropdown menu in which the options are the servers. This wouldn't look good unless we have a very formatted dropdown, hence why we need some designs for it.
• I would also like to employ a more elegant way of handling crashes and errors. For example, instead of not working maybe we can show some sort of popup menu saying "An error has occurred" and then go on to list further options. Perhaps we could detect known errors that cause crashes and display help specific to those errors. The only thing is, we need some UI designs for how this could be possible.
• This isn't a necessity, but it's an aesthetic thing that we can implement. In the bottom left of the laucher the mojang statuses are displayed. We only have room for so many there though. I would like to only show the really relevant ones there, such as auth and sesstions, maybe another if it fits and looks good. The others I'd like to put onto some sort of display box. This would be similar in style to the display box on the website when you click on the "Status" tab on the navbar. Ideally it would darken everything else and show a nice formatted box with the rest of the mojang statuses. Again this isn't necessary, but it would be nice.
• That's basically it, but there are other non-essential things to consider. For example we could spruce up the social media buttons, possibly add some area for our discord so that we can get that more active, reduce wasted space, etc.
As far as I'm concerned, these things should be addressed on a final design. Other things can be changed as per the designer's discretion, but these are musts.
