FilterBlade UI Overhaul: Manifesto

Hello everyone,

Over the past 6 months we've been working on a large update that improves the FilterBlade user experience with the focus on making the 'standard userflow' faster and much more robust.

We're now near done and are now testing and fixing for bugs.

How did we approach this task? First we reviewed our standard flows. We view these as the core:

• (New user) Open FilterBlade => Export filter ingame

• (Returning User) load previous filter => Adjust => Export it ingame

• Quickly find something in the customizer

• Reliably show or hide something in the customizer

• Simulate item drops

• Find out why a filter shows or hides something specific

We have improved all of these workflows significantly!

Let me show you the highlights!

Overview

A lot of decluttering. Styles have been moved into their own button, presets renamed to modules, lots of texts removed, the 'filter overview' is now much more visible.

My Filters

The "My Filters" tab is no longer a tab and has been completely reworked.

Instead we have a dedicated view:

 The new UI is much cleaner and avoids a lot of the previous pitfalls.

Some notes:

• The "My Presets" (soon to be renamed to 'My Modules') tab will not be visible until you have created at least 1 module

• Share, Edit, Duplicate and Delete are visible for the specific filter on hover

• More Infos about the filter, such as description, creation date etc are shown on hover.

• The icons are just for flavour. You can pick one out from a whole bunch, our designer (EKittyQ) has drawn! It'll be a wisdom scroll by default, but it helps with recognizing filters quickly. It also features our two cats.

Personal Experience: The icons are a weird feature. They're completely irrelevant, but they add a lot of flavour at the same time!

Once you load any filter you're "Scoped on it", think how loading in games work or how word documents or the PoB workflow works. We hide the 'my filters' tab and only show a 'back to my filters' button.

This decreases the number of tabs and SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the number of silly things users can do. There are of course warning and safeguards to prevent accidently clicking it and losing unsaved changes.

Customize

The customize tab will receive 3 major changes, all 3 can be seen below:

• (1) All editors in customize start in a 'minified' state. You can click any of them to expand them to the old familiar state. However, if you only want to show/hide something, you can click on the checkbox on the left side. The button is quite smart, there's a lot of handling for hide/disabled states and empty tierlists - all if allows to modify the filter really fast&safe to go back to zooming ASAP.

• (2) There are 3 new buttons in the accordion. These are 'Show advanced toolbar', 'Expand all' and 'Collapse all'. These are not major gamechangers, but add a lot of QOL.

• (3) We're reviewing and restructuring the whole customizer to be more intuitive and use better naming conventions. This significantly improves navigation and presents the structure in a vastly better format.

Personal Experience: The minified state is AWESOME. I initially planned it purely as a mode for new users, but quickly realized that it MASSIVELY improves overview and navigation. There's a lot less scrolling involved, you find things super fast.

Simulate

Last but not least we have the simulate screen. Since we initially coded it: Simulate has barely received any major updates - it's time to change that!

We wanted to give it a glow-up, while pushing even more features into it.

Here's the outcome:

Bonus the "Import item from PoE" and "Item Builder" functions are now much easier to find!

Look how clean it is! All of the options have been moved into the config button on the bottom right. There's a lot of new options as well!:

There are of course a lot of other small changes and improvements, but I'll let you discover those yourself, instead lets wrap up with:

When will this go live?

If all goes well, this will go live within the next 1-2 weeks. This gives us enough time to finetune things before the start of the league and leaves us enough time to do whatever reworks are necessary for the league itself (I'm pretty hyped for a good season of PoE)!

We'll of course be improving and adjusting things based on user feedback.

Best Regards and thank you for your support!

NeverSink