Football Manager: Ideas for the User Interface

It’s about time I did one of these: seeing other posters doing similar things. This post is long so don’t quote it all just to add one little comment at the end. If I had a decent graphics-editing piece of software, I would add mock-ups, but I don’t, so I’ll try and describe the ideas as best as I can now and then perhaps add some mock-ups done in Paint later.

Football Manager 2008 has been out a good long while now, and the time is coming around that we are expecting Football Manager 2009, hoping that it brings with it the changes we want. One major issue, however, for Football Manager 2008, is the user interface. It hasn’t really been picked up on because the UI is certainly functional: as expected, it leads to everything in the game. But the UI needs to be less like some sort of engine room, and more like a living, breathing, dynamic piece of software.

First thing’s first

Get rid of the sidebar. It’s just a major sign that the UI is chunky and separated into different parts. All of the information about a player should be available from the main screen, whether that the clicking on things or not. The basic idea is that alongside the boxes full of Mental, Physical and Technical attributes, we have the Profile box. This summarises the player’s contract, date-of-birth and favoured personnel and clubs. Clicking on this box takes you to a more detailed profile screen.

We also have a training screen, which lists a basic summary of the player’s training. Clicking on this will take you to the training page, where you can see how each and every attribute of the player’s has improved over the past year. The stats box at the bottom of the screen takes you to a more in depth stats screen for the season, but a little button takes you to the history of the player. However, it could also be an idea that the history of the player joins the stats screen.

Of course there are different setups for clubs and other pages, which I hope to go into detail about later.

The New, Dynamic Sidebar

We’ve dropped the sterile sidebar. Here’s the major addition: a dynamic sidebar. Although your key club screens are usually shown on it, such as finance and next matches, as well as any notes, when you click on something on the main screen, the dynamic sidebar will change. For example, when on a player screen, clicking on the flair of that player will take you to his training graph of that attribute, as it does now, the dynamic sidebar then updates to show that player’s flair in a list of the rest of the first team squad. If the first team squad is too large, only the highest are shown, with the player selected separated at the bottom of the list if necessary (his flair being one of the lowest). This feature can also be used to compare players you are interested in signing.

During a match, the sidebar will change again, and will be separated into two parts. The top part shows your team’s formation and the bottom, your team and substitutes. From here you can make substitutions or simple tactical changes. Personally, I’d like to see the sliders gone but that doesn’t seem likely, so when clicking on a player in the formation screen, the sidebar changes to his player instructions, and from there you can navigate to other player instructions, team instructions and set-piece takers. Upon finishing your tactical changes, you click the Confirm button and it shows you the progress by highlighting the button. There would be something like a 15-second timeout, whereby at the end of 15 seconds, the substitution would have to take place. Of course, there are pros and cons about that. If at any time before the change is made you change your mind, simply click the cancel button.

Notes

We all know about the notes feature, which was highly advertised for ’08. To be truthful, I rarely use it. Most of the time I use it to note old newspaper headlines that detailed my glory; only occasionally have I used it to remind me to renew a player’s contract, or offer Steve Finnan a contract in the hope that he would eventually become desperate enough to join a Conference club.

Some of you using Vista may have used this feature: where notes are attached to the sidebar. You could click on the note and be directed to the relevant screen. The inbox holds 150 messages, and any time that a message is in there, it becomes stored as a note until it is out of date. The user can deselect a little note button in the inbox screen, as well as when creating a new permanent note, because some messages are totally useless to you in the sidebar. This feature could also be turned off altogether.

A Schedule

So what’s one way to make Football Manager like a living, breathing interface? A schedule. The user can add their own appointments to it, reminding themselves when to do something, but when a scout has a report, or when the media wish to talk to you, they schedule their own appointments. What this basically does is takes you to different screens at different times and dictate what time messages come through in the inbox. If the user schedules appointments with the coaches every other morning, the game will soon recognise this and continue these appointments indefinitely. In theory, the inbox could be done away with and everything could be done through the schedule’s redirect.

So let’s say your scout, let call him Jasper Perkins, has come back with a report on a goalkeeper, Jack Phillips. On his scouting screen (which is the screen that the schedule takes you to), Jack Phillips is the centre-point, with a list of old reports on the left-hand side, and a list of reports in progress on the right, including their status. On the panel about Jack Phillips, it gives a quick summary of his age, contract and value (basically what is under the picture in the current game), and then the report is summarised under each section. These are the headers we have currently, but without clicking on them no more information is given. A summarising line by the scout is then given, something along the lines of what Amaroq suggested a week or two ago, and then are your buttons which tell the scout what to do next.

These buttons are something like: continue to scout, scout infrequently, stop scouting, throw onto trash pile, or offer a contract. In the old scout reports on the left, different colours indicate what the scout has done since the original report.

When it comes to an appointment with your head coach or assistant, the top training performers are shown as well as a training overview. As usual, clicking on this can take you to the training setup, which ideally would be like a schedule rather than sliders.

The Home Screen

This is basically the equivalent to the inbox. All news messages come through here, but from here you can access everything else important, scouting, training, tactics. The layout is similar to the current home screen, and I’ll use the finances and wages boxes to show what I mean.

Where the finance box currently is there would be a list of messages, with the selected message shown in the panel where the wages screen currently is. The message can be clicked on so that it can expand to fill the whole screen.

Alongside your messages are buttons, which can take you to anywhere relevant. Say you are looking at your pre-season odds. A button will take you to a screen with everybody’s pre-season odds (including every other league), and another could take you to the league table. If the message says that you need to spend a lot of money to avoid relegation, a button would be able to take you to the scouting screen, and from there you can set assignments as well as browse the player list.

The Map

One nice feature that could be used is a map. Before playing a match, in the match-day experience (which personally I dislike – are we the manager or are we watching the match at home?) a map would show you where the two relative football clubs are. In a similar way, the league screen would also have a map, as well as your club having a small map which shows the club’s location in the country. There could also be maps for Champions League group stages and World Cup groups and qualifying groups.

To summarise…

The entire idea behind a revamp of the user interface lies in the fact that at the moment, Football Manager doesn’t flow. The match day experience has attempted to fix that in one of the major parts of the game, but the rest of the game still functions like three or more different games. Every screen should be able to flow seamlessly into another, and a dynamic sidebar centralises everything of importance. Scouting is a good control to see how changes affect the game, and scouting would hope to be more realistic, with scouts arranging meetings with you and doing follow-up scouting, with notes keeping you very up-to-date with their progress, as if they were sending you emails and text messages on location.

That’s all I can think of right now, but if any more comes to me I’ll add it on. I may do mock-ups in the next few days, but they’ll be in Paint and not that great, plus I think I’ve explained the ideas well enough. I now open this thread to debate.

Wow. I don't want to sound desperate but it's been two days and no replies yet. A thread rating at the very least would be nice to see if anyone likes my ideas.

In all honesty i couldn't be arsed to read it all.

You asked for a rating

I like some idea, especially the map. Its been mentioned before but would be a great little addition.

The reason no one replied, I think is because your post is long and there are no mock-ups. Without mockups it is quite hard to visualise some of your ideas.

You asked for a rating

Very clever.

i think all that is great, and if implemented properly would be groundbreaking, however i think that a big appeal of the fm08 seris is that it works on nearly every pc/laptop in the last 5/6 years. making all these changes would increase the spec so many fm addicts wouldn't be able to play it. if you look at other titles ie fifa manager the spec you need for that to run smoothly is higly more expensive that fm. and id add that fm is 10x better game.

but to conclude i think that yeah your ideas are great, however if it meant taking away a considerable amount of players due to graphics and ui i dont think si will consider it. after all they want money and the more players the more money!

if you look at other titles ie fifa manager the spec you need for that to run smoothly is higly more expensive that fm. and id add that fm is 10x better game.

Thats not true. FM and FIFA manager are very similar in terms of need requirements. The only major difference is the need for a decent GPU.

which is expensive buying and installing if you dont know how too.......

Fair point, but most PC's have 256MB GPU anyway and they are very cheap now.

A small, but useful UI idea... on the "compare" screen, the one where you compare one player against another player, there is a drop-down box that you use to choose the player against which to compare the first. On a team with a big roster, reserves, and youth team, that list is incredibly long. Could it be divided up so I don't have to scroll allllll the way down every time I open it to compare to someone new? Maybe divide it by roster (senior, reserves, youth) or something.