Interesting. Maybe you should use more edges of the screen for the UI? (Not left only?)
If it were actually implemented, button layout is negotiable. I could use all the exact same pieces but move them to screen bottom, where we'd get greater width at the price of obscuring the bottom edge of the screen, which I always find blocks what I want to see more often than side UIs, but I'm willing to accept that change if it was really desired. Some pretty easy coding could make it possible to display on the left or right side, or the bottom depending on player preference.
But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Sergey already told me on the Steam forum that the design was terrible and offered absolutely nothing of value to them, without even reading the PoC documentation, just leaping to multiple wrong conclusions by only looking at the three attached screenshots, just as I expected him to. This company is less interested in the contribution of the player community than any company I've ever seen, with the disinterest regularly bordering on outright hostility. It's a sad thing that achieves nothing other than making the game neither as popular nor as good as it could be.
As I said in the PoC documentation, I fully expected that response and in the end for me it doesn't matter, as I did it simply to get some UI design time in that I rarely get a chance to do anymore, and just to see if it could be done the way I envisioned it. I'm fully pleased with both the aesthetic and functional outcome of the design.
As a note for anyone else reading this: I know it's colorful, it was intentional although there is also one entire slide dedicated to noting that it's a trivial task to scale the color saturation to whatever the player base preferred.
However the reason it was intentional was not arbitrary, but based on information presentation research, it's actually an academic subject now.
What was found long ago was that the human brain recognizes colors much faster than numbers. Therefore, with a design that uses this method, how it works is that it rapidly becomes easy to glance at a unit's parameter display and if I see green, I know that I don't need to look long enough to see the numbers. And if one of those parameters changes to yellow/orange/red, they stand out like a sore thumb in your color scan and your eye immediately zooms in on the problematic value and sees what the actual number is.
This is why basically every network/system/industrial plant/etc. monitoring applications use this exact method. I know this as one of my job responsibilities is establishing a mistake-proof monitoring/alerting system for a complex critical path system, and we use a plethora of COTS products, all of which use this method to one degree or another. In all of those non-game cases, 1) there are many, many things to watch, and 2) it's absolutely critical that the people monitoring recognize there is a problem and exactly where it is as quickly as possible.
It's long been proven that strong color cueing is the best way to achieve those goals.
Players monitoring units in combat where you have lots of unit data, any of which can be good/bad/ugly and can also change quickly, have the exact same problem and I decided to apply the very well-proven methodology of using color cueing to make it much easier for players to be able to quickly scan forces and units and know exactly which ones they need to look at, and where to look on those units that need looking at it.