Good game; weak UX – HIARCS Chess for iPad Review

The UI of this app is not very elegant: 1. Inconsistent font usage. Most of the app is using a sans-serif font, but the names of the players in a serif font, and the opening book is in a courier fixed width font. 2. The board should be bigger. When playing a game, the priority is an immersive playing experience and the board should be as big as possible. But there is unnecessary wasted space here. It strikes me that when playing a game, the screen should be optimized for (a) board; (b) clocks; and (c) move list. Sure, resize these smaller if you turn on/off other features, but you should be able to make the game itself the dominant feature. Move the game controls aside. Let us remove the ELO rating views entirely. Minimize the chrome and focus on the game experience. 3. When you hide the opening book list, the game moves list should take up the whole screen, but it doesn't, and the little slider that lets you zip through the game quickly is sitting there, floating in the middle of the screen. Frankly, I'd suggest losing that slider altogether and let us click on the moves themselves. 4. The pop-up menus in the bottom are strange UX. First, that bottom row is a strange place to be showing menus at all. Second, if you click on one menu to show its popover and then try to click on another, the clicks on this bottom bar aren't recognized. This is especially poor UX because you frequently are searching for some menu option, not knowing which menu some feature is on, you'll click on one menu, not see it there, go to click on the next menu, and your tap isn't recognized. You have to tap somewhere to dismiss first popover menu before you can open another popover menu. Also, the presence of titles at the top of the popover menus is a very poor UI choice. 5. Elements are not always updated correctly. For example, I have my engine set at a particular ELO, but it says "2060" for the ELO on the screen. Likewise I had turned off "show captured material" feature, but when I started the app, it showed up again, only disappearing when I started a new game. There are tons of other issues in this UI, too. But let me say that, bottom line, I respect the game engine, but this app desperately needs a UI overhaul. In terms of core functionality, I was hoping that this would capture variations like the desktop app can. E.g. if I go back a few moves and try a different move, I'd like the option of keeping the old line as a variation.
Review by Robert Ryan on HIARCS Chess for iPad.