There's a lot of talk on how to make Cap Lab appeal to a wider audience, but for me one of the biggest improvements could be to just being the user interface up to date.
I love Cap Lab, but it does have this feel that its very much a legacy software which has inherited much of the interface style of DOS based games. I don't mean the graphics, they are fine for a game of this nature, but just the general usability
1) For example, scrolling down lists is cumbersome with the mouse, so extra keyboard support would be great
Whilst you can type the first letter in the product list, you cannot zone in on sugar, because pressing 's' just goes to steel and then pressing u goes to whatever begins with u (just an example).
Mousewheel is not great either, since some lists scroll quickly and some scroll one row at a time.
2) Navigation..
If you're off in some distant city and click an alert about R&D completion, it will jump to the R&D center.
But By this time you've totally forgotten what city you were in, with no way to get back to it, let alone the factory you were busy working on.
Didn't Cap 2 have a Back button, which at least tried to take you back to the previous screen? This seems to have been abandoned in Cap Lab, and whilst it wasn't perfect in Cap 2 either, it occasionally helped.
3) Maybe the new scripting environment could allow us to assign better keyboard shortcuts (I hate that arrow keys change city, and to just move around the map I have to hold down ALT and arrow).
Please also, let us adjust mouse sensitivity.
4) When setting up departments for a farm, if you dont have a saved template you have to dblclick each crop growing unit in turn, then scroll down the list to select the crop, then do the same for the next one. There should be a button to say 'Apply to All', so you can just select Rubber for one crop growing unit, click All, and it will select Rubber for all other crop growing units in that farm too.