How Content Manager fixed Assetto Corsa’s bad menu UX?
Assetto Corsa is one of the most beloved simulators in the sim racing community. The Italian outfit created one of the best racing simulators that you can get in the market with some of the best cars in the history. From the 1960s Ferraris to the modern day GT3 cars, Kunos covered a wide range of selections to please your racing urges.
As good as Assetto Corsa is, there was a major shortcoming. The terrible user experience. Asssetto Corsa was plagued by the bad UX like every other sim racing games that came out in the mid 2010s. It had tons of wasted space in the main menus and a colour scheme that rivalled the creativity of a 10yr old kid. There were too many steps and too many clicks to make a small change in your setup and selection.
As frustrating the UX is, the simulation was so good to write Assetto Corsa off but there was hope at the end of the tunnel in the form of “Content Manager”. A third party launcher for the game which fixed all the major issues with the original UX of the game.
Despite Kunos’s best attempt at providing a good UX for the user, there are two major pain points while navigating through Assetto Corsa.
- The overall clunky and slow UI with multiple tabs
- Unintuitive way to join online lobbies
Now that we know the major pain points, we will see how Content Manager (CM) was able to mitigate these problems.
Content manager started as a third party game launcher for Assetto Corsa and improved the overall UX of the game and also added more tweaks and mods to improve the quality of life of the product. Let’s look at CM’s Landing screen and compare it with the original launcher.
Right out of the gate, we can see CM offers more options to the user than Assetto Corsa ever did. It is easy to choose between different modes without having to lose focus on other aspects such as wind, temperature which are essential for any simulator.
Lets dive into the first problem. Here you can see the number of steps it takes for an user to select their car and track. Once you are in the summary section, you have to go back to the cars tab to change your car. The same for track selection. You cannot view any summary unless you select the car and the track which is a bit annoying.
Meanwhile, Content Manager makes it easier by providing more options in the same section. You don’t have to fiddle with tabs and screens to set up a session.
Kunos wasted more space to centre the contents and the icons they chose don’t convey the meaning properly.
“To many symbols, you need to hover on them to see what they mean”
The most common complaint, I heard was the unavailability of proper labels to the icons. You have to select the option to even see what the tab means. In the below example you can see the steering wheel icon indicates the “Drive” tab but we don’t know what the trophy icon denotes. I thought it was supposed to show me my in-game trophies but it actually represents the Career mode which is clearly not translated by Kunos here.
Content Manager uses a straight forward labelling method to avoid this confusion. As the sections are labelled clearly, it is easy to navigate through the menus. The same cannot be said for Kunos’s launcher.
Content Manager also eliminates the janky and slow animations used in the default launcher. The player don’t have to wait one whole second for the stuttering animation to complete just to change their car or track.
Kunos’s offers players to host their own games in private servers which is great as players don’t have to depend upon Kunos to run the servers and fear that they might drop support in near future but it also brings it’s own set of problems. With custom servers players need to know the server names or IP addresses of the host machine to join the games which is a tedious process. With Content Manager, the player can simply share a link which will redirect other players directly to the server address and makes it easy to join a lobbies with one single click.
Content Manager will list all the available servers and also gives the user the option to sort and search through the list with ease.
The bottom line is that Kunos should take more time and refine their UX. Players are smart enough to understand the elements that are available on the screen and can take proper decisions for themselves. They don’t need to baby their players and hold their hands in every step. I hope Kunos learn from their mistakes and implement a proper Menu system for the next Assetto Corsa game which will be Assetto Corsa 2, if the rumours are true.
Thank you for taking your time and reading my blog. Much appreciated ❤.
