In theory, the use of these circled initials should work to give us a quick understanding of the participants in a scene. In practice, however, they don’t. See the screenshot:
In the bottom scene, which admittedly has an excessive number of participants (hint: it’s a massive battle scene), I simply have no idea who most of these characters are at a glance.
Sure, I can hover over each one so that a tooltip will reveal the character, or I can open the inspector to see a list. By the time I do either, my attention is diverted from my story. That’s not good.
I understand that avatars will be introduced in AT 3.5, but I’m not one to create images for my characters. Even if I were, I don’t see how the character avatars would be used in, say, the Spreadsheet or Outline views.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Could there be an option for the complete list of characters to appear in a hover modal? (Probably not, but that’s all I can think of.)