Chat Room UI

Author: Liam Simpson

Chat Room User Interface

The following information regards the design, implementation and user testing.

Design and user testing conducted by Liam Simpson. Implementation has been done by team rocket as a group.

The User interface of the Chat Room is designed to be as intuitive as we could manage such a system. The message box provides formatting for text displaying messages from each respective author to their assigned side. Friends messages will be shown on the left-hand side while your messages will be on the right. Users have the option to also send unicode characters and emojis to their friends by using the selection box provided.

The friends list (channels) are situated on the left-hand side as a panel that has a minimum width attribute. This is to ensure that it does not hide important information regarding your friends and it's easily definable which channel you are viewing. By double clicking on a channel field you can remove a friend from the channel list. When selecting friends from a channel field to speak to the channel you have selected will trigger a corresponding username and avatar inside the banner which changes as the channels do. When adding friends inside the chat room you must input a username correctly. Incorrect username entries will be blocked by the server wont be displayed in the channel field list.

Since checkpoint 1 the chatroom has undergone a massive transformation for its user interface. The listviews that cover of the screen space have an opcacity styling of 0.75. This makes it still easy to view and read the contents within the list views but blend the scene into the background styled to suit the look of the game. To access the chatroom at any scene of the game use the TAB shortcut or select CHAT from the main menu.