Yeah, lets stick with the well known Keyboard even though we have the new mouse fangled thingy. Icons? who needs Icons, we have keyboard shortcuts!

Personally, I envisioned it with colors not just symbols, which would make it more compact and easier to read.

I didn't say numbers were ugly, I said numbers ranging from 0 to 1,000,000,000,000 is ugly. It messes up the formating or leaves big holes in the UI.

There's a difference between UI innovation and doing things in a bizarre, counter-intuitive way. If we were talking about new input devices or complete UI redesigns, then the "rule of least surprise" is less relevant. But Lusternia is a text game, and the ways in which it interacts with players, and players interact with it, are strictly defined and unchangeable. Within these constraints it's least surprising to use numbers to display information, instead of "graphical" bars. The current percentile system uses three characters to display information with 100 points of accuracy; your system uses 27 characters to do the same, in a way that is ambiguous (In what order is it? How am I supposed to read it? Keep in mind that just saying "Those three bars are experience to next level" is useless - the interface requires a detailed explanation.) and inscrutable to new players.

Adding another percentile point might be better.

A hybrid way of displaying experience, which would be more useful for higher-level players, might be:

Level: 67.34 (52/5326 points to next percentile)

Or more verbosely:

Level: 67 (34% to next level, 52 out of 5326 points to next percentile)

This is primarily to keep very high-level players from having something like:

Level: 97 (5342672747434 out of 540000000000 experience points to next level.)

(Figures are wholly made-up)

Plenty of muds use graphical bars instead of numbers for things. I'm not sure what "least surprise" impact you are talking about.

The shortest of the suggestions that you made use up 56 characters, are not at all vague (which some people like) and don't look particularly easy to read quickly.

Also, if you don't know how to read the bars after your second time of gaining experience, I would be really surprised. Especially when it uses colors.

Daganev, when you're starting out as a newbie, you get experience in such comparatively huge jumps that it wouldn't really make much sense to them. Unless they find the relevant help file, they have no way to tell which bar means exactly what, and even then it taken longer to extract the numbers from that than to just see them straight off.

Say I'm a newbie. I'm at 0% experience; my bars display:

---------
---------
---------

Then I kill something and go up to 17.5%. My bars display:

+--------
+++++++--
+++++----

How much is that? Then I kill the same mob again, going up to 35%:

+++------
+++++----
---------

It's not at all intuitive; most people won't make the mental leap to what it represents.

This system is equivalent to:
Level: 62(45.5%)

But much harder to read, especially with any degree of precision. If you want to be able to think about how much experience you got, you'll be forced to mentally convert between bars to numbers constantly. It doesn't give information in an useful and precise way.

Bars are useful for things which always fall within a limited domain, aren't terribly important (People won't want that much precision) and can be displayed with little precision. Using multiple bars, one for each order of magnitude, is horribly inefficient and hard to read.

ETA: Perhaps a better restating of the Principle of Least Surprise is: An UI's behaviour need not be innovative. Everything else being equal, it should behave in the most common way possible; it should only deviate from the norm when it can be established that it's objectively better than the norm. Or maybe just: Innovation is not a goal in UI design.

Those bars sound like a really bad idea. When I was first starting out on the nexus clients, I had absolutly no idea which bar (IE: Health, Mana, Endurance, Willpower, Ego) was which. And they were even color coded.

Plus, the individule bars would be exceptionally difficult to count, especially for those of us who play in a really high resolution without enlarging the text.

In my own opinion, the three bars would be as difficult to understand as having a small '()' at the end of your prompt that gradually changes from Red to Green, with the greener it is, the closer you are to gaining a level.

Personally, I prefer the 'XY.Z%' display idea for experience. As it's not so vauge as to have you hunting for hours only to see a one percentile difference, it's not so precise that you'll have three lines of numbers because the maximum wrapwidth is to small to display it all on one line (comment is largly exagerated), and it's not at all confusing.

Good point about the high resolution, I've been stuck on nexus for so long I forgot about that.

I still prefered those muds that use bar graphs to represent health/mana/xp gain. It was nice and enjoyable for me.

They should just leave SCORE as-is and put in an EXPERIENCE command that lets you view the raw numbers for experience gain/loss/levelup.