I think part of the problem with a lot/all of the devs working on Maya is -
you guys use this stuff day in and day out and you already understand how &
why things are the way they are.
I would strongly urge the entire Maya team to do some real user interface &
usability testing with a 3rd party testing service. Get people from all
sorts of backgrounds and actually record them trying to use Maya to achieve
specific tasks. My gut instinct says, most of the team will be very
surprised at how unintuitive and difficult Maya is for most people that
don't live in the Maya universe.
As for top 5:
1. Text based everything - I hate the shelf in Softimage as well as the UV
editor. Get rid of icons entirely.
2. Drag and drop divots & simple expressions.
3. Consistent UI - this was my last wish for Softimage. I wanted the
FXTree to be updated to match ICE and the Render Tree (and possibly the
schematic view to get updated as well). There should not be more than 1
style of graph in Maya and all navigation should use the same mouse/key
combo everywhere. Additionally, revisit what things are named. As
mentioned in a previous email - why is there at tab called Renderer and a
tab called Rendering, or a tab called Shading and a tab called Surfaces?
Maybe to long-time Maya users that makes sense, but if you open the
software for the first time, that makes absolutely no sense at all.
4. Sticky keys.
5. Middle-click repeat the last action. I use this every day of the week.
-PG
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <luceri...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > Text not icons
>
> I don't understand this one. Which part of the UI is this a problem
> with that it isn't in Softimage?
>
> You have the shelf at the top of the UI, but that's just shortcuts to
> things that are already in the menu. Hide the shelf if you don't want
> it (there is also a shelf in XSI)
>
> For the viewport ("panel") toolbar, if you don't use it, you can hide
> it (shift+ctrl+m) - these are all shortcuts to the items also in the
> menu. It certainly would not make sense to turn that into text
> buttons, although they should be generally fewer and bigger buttons
> there.
>
> But again these are shotcuts to the text menus. Everything is
> menu-based in Maya.
>
