The great and mighty CCP Saberwing flew to me from the heavens with his saber-sharp wings, and he has beseeched me, the glorious emperor god-king KAGEHOSHI, with a scroll with five-hundred-fourteen golden seals (Twitter message) asking me to compile a list of important HUD stuff. In the past I have made this thread (
Improving the HUD) full of ways to improve the HUD, but here I shall extract only the most important functional stuff only, as well as some new ones I have come across on the forums.
[Map/minimap] East, West, and South on the minimap. Very important.
Grids on the map/minimap to make calling out locations more effective, similar to how the maps have grids in the map feedback section (example). Your current coordinates should be very easy to tell on the minimap. If possible, the target readout when aiming should also list the coordinates as well.
Building outlines shown on the minimap. This is very important information to know.
[Team/squad] Who's talking indicator: A speaker icon along with the name of the person talking should pop up when someone on your team or squad is talking. Also the icon should float over their characters heads so you can visually see who is talking.
Squad list: A list of your squadmates right on the HUD. Should include sqad status indicators:
-Their current suit under their names (to quickly visually identify them)
-Squad leader indicator (duh)
-Shield and armor bar to easily tell who needs help, etc.
-Mortally wounded indicators (name highlighted in red)
-Inside a vehicle indicators (little car symbol)
-Clone terminated/respawning indicators (name is grey, or crossbones symbol)
Total squad WP below the list so you can tell how close to getting a strike your squad is.
An indicator for strikes that stays on the screen until the is used. Sometimes the notifications aren't noticed in the heat of battle, so having them last until the strike is used (or are no longer available).
[Equipment] Support equipment icons: Its useful to know who is carrying a nanohive, repair tool, and nanite injector, even when you don't currently need those things. It can be very important to know what your teammates can and can't do for you.
Low ammo icon: those who carry nanohives should see a special icon over those with low ammo to indicate the need for nanohives.
Have the equipment that you or your squadmates deployed appear as a green to know which ones are yours or your squad's.
Some sort of notification of when your equipment has been destroyed.
[Weapon] A different crosshair to indicate when a weapon is done charging, right now its hard to tell when for example a forge gun is fully charged because the charge gauge is all the way down inside the ammo meter; I shouldn't have to take my eyes of the target to check if fully charged. This would not be needed if all weapons had a distinctive sound, animation, and/or visual effect synchronized with charge completetion to queue the user. This one isn't really that important since you can just get use to it, but I think it would be good for usability.
The grenades-carried indicator on your HUD should display different symbols for the various grenade types, or some text to tell you what your type of grenades are.
[Other] We need an indicator to know when we are being repaired by a repair tool. This is very important for teamwork; you don't want a guy you're repairing to run off from you because he doesn't know you were repairing him. This is a must, we had it before a while ago, but it was removed (thought its removal was a bug, but maybe it isn't).
I noticed right now that messages about whether you are scanned, hacking taking place, and others occupy the same place, and only one can be displayed; if an enemy starts hacking a CRU, I will no longer get information about whether or not I have been scanned. It might be good idea to just stack these messages, and even the squad order, RDV, and strike messages to the right where the kill-tracker currently is, and move the kill-tracker thing lower on the screen to make room (inspired by this).
-Upper right corner may be able to display squad orders, if you have been scanned, pending RDV requests, what is being hacked, etc.
-Lower right corner will show who kills who.
Without doing any radical shift in layout, or getting into immersion stuff like HUD-wobble (which should have never been removed), this is what I believe is important for improving the HUD. Behold the mighty list! marvel at how I typed things!
Seriously wish I could have just typed all this directly on twitter with one big direct message, I hate character limits.