BEFORE

AFTER (update 2)




i played arround a little with Paint (plz excuse any background color artifacts, i'm no photoshop magician ;P )





- instead of a drop down menu the "Display All" / "Completed" / "In Progress" filters are now located to the left.

the main window now only shows the Icons of the Accolades (like a Medal Showcase)
accolades that are still in progress are darkened and have a progress bar indicating the progress
accolades that are finished have no more progress bar and are fully visible

if you click on an accolade the icon is highlighted and a Detail Window pops up on the right side with all the detailed information.

*note: i altered the text of the Conductive Cleaving Accolade so that it states what the "Conductive Cleaving passive skill" actually does ....which is + 2 Polaron dmg resistance.
That little info was only avaible after you completed the accolade and went into your chars passive skills to mouse over the skill.
Why not say what it is before you start working on it?
Not everything has to be so "Cryptic" ;P

also the Points the accolade gives are listed in the Detail Window, i thought about adding the points inside the main window under the icons but there isn't realy any use if you have the Total Points there allready.


// update 1:

- Recently Tab added
- Date of unlock is now displayed below completed accolades
- Mouse Over icon's displays quick info with Accolade Name, no delay

// update 2:

- Search and Filter function added

I support moving the filters to the left tab. While I see how listing the medals instead looks nice, I don't think it'll be that useful/functional.

Firstly, do they actually have medal graphics for every accolade? (I'd have to check this, I'm not too sure)
Secondly, a popup says you've just earned "Unruly Roost". You have no idea what you earned that for. Now how would you find it in your listing? At least how it has it now in alphabetical order, I can quickly scan it for the name by jumping from category to category. With the graphical setup, you'd have to randomly pick a medal which you think might be close to yours (I'm assuming they'd still be alphabetical), then keep blindly clicking until you finally home in on the one you want.

Perhaps we can have that (like a "medal case view") as it's own little separate fluff view, but not to replace the original GUI.

If we did have a UI like that, I do like the use of the pop-out description, but only if it was longer to actually fit the whole description (scrollbar/scrolling is unnecessary)




Now that I'm thinking about it, I would like to see an additional side-tab for "recent" which would show all accolades that were recently completed or discovered (either for that session, until you view them, past 10 minutes, whatever, or all of the above with a drop-down-list selector)
As accolades pop-up on your screen as they are completed or discovered (do they even popup when discovered? Or are they all just "discovered" to start? I don't know) you should be given an option to view them, not unlike the group loot window popups. Use a similar GUI that can stack and will disappear after 30 seconds; you can mouse-over for a description or click on them to launch the journal/accolade window with that accolade selected.

Finally, it might be nice to have a little search box in the accolade window. So when your friend asks you, "Hey, how much more do you need for Disruptor Devastator" (or when you want to check), you can just start typing in "Disru" and it will automatically start filtering the list and select the best match.


EDIT: I find It's actually these accessibility issues that are most preventing me from actively pursuing accolades. It's a pain to look them up and play with them so I simply don't bother. "Oh, I just Blockade of Border Worlds? I wonder what that was for. Oh well." Or "I just got XXXX, but I'm in the middle of combat and can't check now *forgets to check indefinitely*)

you have some good points there,
i made a little update to the OP and a little updated picture.

I fully support this.

OK how about this:

Accolade Tab v3

Much cleaner Z3R0B4NG, I love it.

/signed

Its got my vote

Could we also have the names below or above the medals? I really like this idea though.

One thing I like about the accolades is that fact that they're medals and not, like some quirky icon of a stick figure on fire or something. It gives it more class than XBL achievements, though at the same time most of the accolades are merely trials of endurance.

There needs to be some more involved ones like "Kill a borg by knocking him into the plasma coolant in infected" or "Finish the first part of KA with no spheres getting though on your first try since you last completed it" (I did BTW) or "vaporize 3 enemies with an expose attack at once".
Stuff like that.

the thing is that the names are horribly long, i have no idea how to fit them in there without reducing it to 3 accolades per row, or without cutting the names off all the time...

i think the look of the icons would soon be connected in the users head to the name of the accolades this way. (at least the users that are intrested in this stuff)

it is like the internet explorer or firefox icon, you don't need the name written out to know what it is.

i think it is easier to remember an image then those strange names.

I strongly disagree with you there.

Take your browser suggestion, you have a few browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera), and each icon is very different from each other. Furthermore, you use those icons/browsers all the time.

Now consider the accolades: how many are there? 50? 75? 100? The badges are very similar to each other (they all look like badges). And finally, you never really use them. Moreso, you get informed about them textually by their name, not by image.

For us, as humans, it's much easier for us to be given a name and pick it from a list (especially if the list is alphabetically sorted). Rather than be given an image and pick it out from a pool of other similar images (which could not be sorted).


EDIT: just to clarify. Picking out from images is more efficient if you have a small set of images. But once it reaches a certain threshold (which the accolades list FAR, FAR exceeds) it becomes impossible.