Making the nice new UI even better

[nnikbin]

Although the Fusion 360 new UI looks really great and I appreciate all the work being done in creating the concept and designing and developing it, but I find it a little confusing. The reason is that the tabs are not sufficiently distinguishable in my opinion. Please take a look at the pictures below:

For making tabs more distinguishable I suggest using the following design or something similar:

PS: At the time of this writing, the new UI is in preview mode and can be activated using Preferences > Preview > UI Preview check box

[Leo_Dyn]

Those few lines you added in make such a great difference!

Without those, on first glance it looks like the "solid" "surface" "sheet metal", etc. are headings for the tools you can see and not tabs to different tools all together. I know what they are going for and it still throws me with the lack of separation.

[derekmcleod]

I think that small bit of differentiation is very important. If not as you have shown, then an indication when you hover over that those are in fact 'buttons' and not just static text. When I switched to the new UI, I thought that the Patch workspace had disappeared since I didn't realize it was contained within Surface, which I also didn't realize is actually a tab. 

[danh818]

Nice little addition.. makes a big difference.

[danh818]

Can we also get the outlined area back?  The new UI actually has less total usable screen real estate.  If we had smaller buttons and a toolbar that expanded and contracted as needed we would get back a good bit of usable space.  It annoys me that the outlined area isn't transparent in the new UI as it was in the old.    

[nnikbin]

Hi @danh818,

Thank you for your comments. I totally agree with you that it is more better to have a toolbar with transparency in the area you outlined or perhaps in a smaller area at the right side of the toolbar (which is not occupied by design tabs). I suggest you post your idea to Fusion 360 Preview Functionality forum and Fusion 360 IdeaStation.

[Kranos_Orphydian]

yeah, a bit of separation wouldnt hurt