I remember the EJ UI thread having a pretty okay reputation back in the day; of course the chance of that being reality are slim to none, but I'll romanticize the past as I see fit. Today a largely different trend has emerged, where the best UIs posted are mediocre, and the vast majority are downright terrible.

What's even more obnoxious is that many of these folks think their UI is worth downloading, and once they've duped 50 14-year olds from Sweden into downloading it, they proclaim...

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Design is Functional and Aesthetic

Niels Diffrient rethinks the way we sit down | Video on TED.com

Above is a link to a video by Niels Diffrient, who created the Freedom Chair. The part I find the most compelling is the beginning; Diffrient recounts his childhood love of airplanes - the combination of the physical machine, and the aesthetic experience of being a pilot (the clothes, the women, the airplane, and the physical body of the pilot). In an attempt to capture...

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Refining (read: min-maxing) your UI is a process of justification: questioning the underlying logic behind your UI layout and choosing the options which make your interface as functional as possible. Justifying your UI s is a lot like justifying your spec, your raid strategy, or your rotation: it’s a critical process to becoming an effective raider.

The main function of the user interface is the display of information to the player, and a ‘good’ UI will display that information...

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I was going to open this blog post by saying that PitBull must obviously be the most popular UnitFrame addon available, but it looks like xperl has about 3 million more downloads than Pitbull (of course, that might be due to PitBull not being primarily distributed by Curse until late last year). In any event, PitBull is an incredibly popular UnitFrame addon for World of Warcraft; and a new version is about to be let loose on an unwitting public!

Ckknight, among others, have been...

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At the outset, I'll concede that this is a recycled post from omgphatloots.org; and recycling a post is a pretty shitty way to start a new blog. That said, this topic engendered some of the most intelligent and thoughtful discussions on UI design I've seen in a while. I intend to use this space to discuss the more 'mature' side of critically evaluating the user interface in World of Warcraft. I've got some other, fresher, posts in the pipelines for the future - consider this a throwback.
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