Too Much Information -- and Not Enough

Ran into a technical writing problem in the wild this morning.

Well, part of it may be a design problem. But I think I can safely shoehorn technical writing into the mix, as we're dealing with a design that's trying to present too much information.

First, a little background.

I play Seaport, a relatively addictive game developed by Pixel Federation on my Kindle. Whether or not this is a game for you isn't part of this blog post, so if that's what you want to talk about, move along.

The designers of the game recently updated a few items, including the screen that shows up when you wish to dispatch one of your ships to a destination to pick up or drop off supplies. Here's the screenshot of the redesign:

I wish I had a before shot to share as an example of how the design used to work compared to the redesign where I feel like they're offering too much information at once. I think I can see the utility of the information they're presenting now, but in my opinion -- and for my old eyes -- they're trying to make this screen do too much.

First, I don't have a screenshot of the Before Times, because I took it for granted. But simply put when you tap on a destination for one of your ships, it displayed the following information based on your goal in going there:

1. If you were going to pick up supplies, it either gave you a short list to scroll through so you could decide what supplies you wanted to pick up, or if it was a one-supply depot, just a display of how much that particular ship could pick up.

2. If you were going to deliver supplies, it gave you a tally of how much of the supply you've already delivered, how much yet to deliver, and how much the current ship you were dispatching could carry. It would also show how much of the supply you had on hand to deliver.

They call it New Ship Flow, and are clearly happy about it. Players -- at least those commenting on the forums -- are not. It appears to be better accepted by those who play on PCs, but for us mobile gamers, the changes are just too much because they reduce the size of everything.

Now it's cluttered up with the scrolling menu of ships. I suppose -- I haven't tried the functionality yet -- that it offers you the choice to dispatch more than one ship without having to exit the screen. It appears you can also cancel a ship voyage if you catch it in time in order to dispatch that ship to a new location.

It's all potentially valuable things to do. But it makes the screen more cluttered. The type and pictures are smaller, harder for my old eyes to see. Thus presenting too much information that's hindering what I want to accomplish on the screen.

The update has introduced other mistakes, but they appear to be mistakes in design, not in writing, or deciding what information to present on the screen. To their credit, the game developers are listening.

This might be a good example of the perils of designing across multiple platforms, but a good technical writing look at this might have identified the problems before they went live.