Mar 28, 2025
On visual cues and German philosophers
A few days ago I decided to spend a little time trying to make the hierarchy view a bit more readable. Actually, "scannable" is the term we learned when I was studying design.
One of the prime directives of design is making sure the important information comes through.
With something as (potentially) densely populated as the hierarchy view of a Unity project, one of the major concerns is grouping. Indentation is often the only visual cue in there that tells us something about what belongs together. That's not nothing, but as you "scan" the hierarchy looking for a particular group of things, most groups tend look the same. Finding what you're looking for takes more time than it needs to. Not a lot, but enough that over the course of a day is accumulates into a sizeable chuck if your precious time.
There are a lot of ways to create visual groups. You might read up on the "Gestalt principles of design", borrowed and transmuted from the German and Austrian gestalt psychologists. (The German word "Gestalt" translates into something like "shape"). It's stuff like "put things close together and the human mind perceives them as grouped". That's the gestalt principle of proximity.
I made two small unity components. The first one creates a single color box on top of the standard game object icon and lets me input a single unicode character to use as a symbol. It was the simplest/quickest path to something usable, and then I liked the constraints it imposed. Kept me from endlessly tinkering.
[↑] Here they both are.
The second one is a little bit more complicated. During play, it highlights (in bright cyan) all the game objects that are currently "selected" in the menu system. It lets me visually track what has selection, which was invaluable as I was working on visualizing that same information in the game itself.
*[♪] Ben Chatwin - Unravel
