Inspector UI / visual design improvements

[rihok]

Describe the project you are working on

Doesn't affect any particular project

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

Doesn't affect any particular project

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

The current property panel is quite intimadating to new users, even ones familiar with game engines. When it comes to visual hierarchy of the design, it's really difficult to follow what headline belongs to what component and in general the hiearchy of information seems all over the place. This makes it hard to find what you're looking for, and also is confusing to users.

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

There are many well known UI patterns to help alleviate some of this, but to start with, making all headlines left aligned would be a good start, except for component headers perhaps. That would already make it easier to distinguish between a component header and a category header. Category headers also seem to be visually overly strong compared to their importance, I would perhaps go with the Unity approach where the category header just just bolded compared to the property names. Also collapsing categories are a little bit too tightly spaced. There's often important things hidden inside them, they should occupy at least the same height as a category header I would think. These are just broad suggestions, ideally this would be looked at by a UI designer.

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

No.

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

It's part of the core UI of the Editor.

[RedMser]

making all headlines left aligned would be a good start
Category headers also seem to be visually overly strong compared to their importance

Have you tried using export groups instead of export categories? They're left-aligned and much less visually distinct than categories are.

Not sure what the point of exposing categories to scripting was, but they're usually only used for inheritance.