Suggested New Scanner UI

To say that the response to the current Ingress scanner UI changes has been strong would be an understatement. Agents everywhere are screaming “It #HurtsToHack” and “I’m going to drop my phone constantly!” and “OMGWTFBBQ?!”. We tend to agree, especially with the last sentiment.

One thing we’re noticing which is different than the typical knee jerk backlash response, is the many improvement suggestions we’ve seen for a more ideal and ergonomic layout.

While we have reassurances from Mr. Niantic himself that changes will be made:

We’d like to put forward the most refined, user friendly, erognomic layout suggestion we’ve come across so far. Big kudos to designer extraordinaire Robert Vaughan for this design.

Here is the current scanner layout with a comfort map overlayed:

Green = very comfortable to reach. Yellow = fairly uncomfortable. Red = Very uncomfortable.

As you can see, some of the most commonly used buttons are in less than ideal spots for comfort and some of the least used buttons are right in the green zone.

Robert has presented a few great ideas beyond button reorganization, some of which have been suggested before, but this is one of the most complete concepts we’ve seen.

• Adequate space for portal names (very few should get truncated any more).
• Top of the screen occupied by something you don’t actually need to tap.
• Add images below portal image to show if you’ve captured it before, visited it before, how many days you’ve owned it, if it’s a mission start point, share feature, extra info and your key count.
• Added incoming and outgoing link count (now you don’t have to count links or just “try and see what happens” when it comes to max outgoing portal links).
• Add an option under scanner, ops to switch from Left to Right handed (see images below).

Here is a more optimized layout for those who hold their scanner in their right hand:

 Here is the comfort map for a right handed layout:

Here is a more optimized layout for those who hold their scanner in their left hand:

Here is the comfort map for a left handed layout:

While no layout is perfect for every person on every device, we think this is the closest we’ve seen yet.

What are your thoughts?