Unique aspects of my UI:

- Custom modified Emergency Monitor that places the names and values "inside" the bar - saves a lot of space. (Gotta look at the screenshot to understand)
- No bloody fat ass 3d animating class portraits. Simple color coded frames. Even the Perl party frames have been made as compact.
- Target frame is centered right smack in the middle of the screen along with party bars and EM. This allows me to select the people I want with minimal movement of the mouse.
- I use Flexbar to hide around 20 spell icons which are hotkeyed. Again, to save screen space.
- Inner Focus is placed immidiately next to GH5 and PoH5. Because both spells are prime candidates for free mana cast.




PS: This screenshot doesnt show it, but I also have TT and TTT frames.
I've also switched over to SW_Stats since then.
Oh, and, the "Healing done" meter is only up because I was having a little competition with another healer - not cuz I am a believer in "Healing meters" ^^

No, I like to have the absolute HP values in there, and it just doesn't fit when the name is inside as well.

You can leave the HP value on the bottom left, move the % HP to the far upper right and put the name inside the unitframe at the top left. That should be enough space, if you wanted to do it.

I must be the last living soul to use status bars.

http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...tatusbars.html

Just to add my 2c, from my design experience with the Discord Suite, as well as with more traditional design mediums (Adobe, HTML/CSS, Javascript) a big thing that a lot of WoW UIs lack is visual unity and use of contrast to pre-cognitively identify things, basically allowing you see all the most important things without having to look away fro what you're doing. Fancy wording, etc., but basically what could help a lot of UIs is less information being thrown in your face all at once, and either moving pertinent information closer to the center of your vision so that your peripheral sight can pick up more information more easily.

A few things that can make things easier to read:

Like I said, keep it simple, don't necessarily take everything out, but if it's not essential, then tone down its visual importance so that it doesn't distract you from getting the most crucial information as fast as you can. And, like other posters have said, get rid of fancy whizbang features like animating portaits and flashy crits, tone down a large amount to colors to a more desaturated and easier to see color palette. Less is more, and more elements that are disjointed can take information from being an easy read to a wall of text very fast.

In keeping with the above ^^:

Create a Visual Heirarchy in your UI. Anyone who has written any kind of code or even read a poorly written app can tell you that information with no sense of separation of parts or visual difference is not fun to look at and frustrating to try to interpret. Create a solid visual anchor, containing the most pertinent information to you on the screen at that time, that naturally draws your eye. This anchor is a good place to put the things most important to your class, i.e. important cooldowns, targets, players, etc. that you're going to want to be able to flash a look at quickly while you're doing something else.

Like I said earlier, if your UI mods will permit it, limit the number of colors you are using or try to systemize them somehow. The general idea behind this is that the more things obey the rules, the more somehting will stick out if it breaks the rules, making it more likely that it will catch your attention. For example, say you have a cooldown coming up, (just from my experience with Discord) make a HUGE ass floater near the middle of the screen pop up so you can't miss it, with a bright texture color around it so it really sticks out and yells CLICKY MEE!!

I know these ideas are kinda disjointed and basic and just scratching the surface, but it's just what happens to be on my mind as I'm trying to unwind from one of my interface design projects so you guys get to deal with it :D. Hopefully it'll give you an idea of what I try to do when I make my stuff, and you'll be able to apply it to WoW "designage" productively :D.

edit: can't spell cognitive :/.

this is how my interface looks right now. the threatmetter is usually hidden, i pull it out only for a few bosses. the hud is nurfed with the textures from dhud, i keep my buffs on the left, debuffs on the right (satrina buff frame), dot timers between the hp/mp bars. under the combat log is the pet bar (not seen in this screenshot). before 1.12 i was using a hacked version of xraidstatus ( http://paradoxguild.net/gogu/xrs.jpg top left corner) but it`s not working right now and i didn`t have the time to fix it so i`m using aguf raid frames as a temporary solution (i don`t like the latest version of xrs). i still need to figure out a place where to put my party frames (in a raid they are hidden, in a party they go in the top left corner).

I've actually considering scaling down my bars, but I've found in a raid, I actually use a combination of click healing, hot keys and plain old clicking on the button.

I don't have my player frame showing for this reason. As for the size, I think that's more of a personal preferance.

Can we see a screenshot of this? I, personally, cannot stand having anything at the top centre of my screen, because that's where the action is.

While nothing 100% new, I do find that people like to have the "MASSIVE BLOCK OF BUTTONS" in the middle thing, and for a while I had that too. Then I realized that I never clicked them and the only things I needed from there were:

a - Is this ability on cooldown?
b - Is this ability in range?

So, I present you with my personal solution. I'm a fairly accomplished pianist so I never really look down at my keyboard while playing (in either case!) and I have everything memorized. If I don't need to look at the buttons to know which triggers what, then they may as well be hidden - as my UI is right now.

Range is monitored by the bottom right corner (Nudge, AceSVN) and cooldowns are monitored on the mid-left (Cooldown, AceSVN). Also, almost everyone has some sort of combat log to make the thing readable. Mine's SimpleCombatLog, which is nice for several reasons - specific target/source monitoring and it's tiny (AceSVN again). Also, the autoshot/aimedshot cast bar in the center really helps for hunter rotations (BigTrouble, AceSVN). The last thing I use that I haven't seen around a lot is PerfectTargets (AceSVN, as usual). It shows what the raid is targeting, the number of people targeting something, its health and its raid icon/hunters mark status if applicable. If it's hooked into oRA2, it can also show the tank currently on it. I use this in conjunction with oRA2's MT frames to speed assist targeting/pulling.

Finally, not shown but absolutely indispensable -> EKKWaitlist, EKKAttendance. They were linked in a previous "For Raid Leaders Mod Thread" or something similar, and they make life as an officer SO much more bearable during busy raid days.

My UI could probably be more compact to have a more screen real-estate available, but overall I'm fairly happy with a ~20-25MB raid UI that works and works well, at least for me. I take no responsibility if you try this and forget which button does tranq. right before Gluth frenzies. ^_~

[edit] - Fixing IMG tag.

I got a shot of my UI tonight, so I figured I'd post it. I'm not going to inline it since it doesn't contain anything revolutionary (except these cool buff bars I found! :P), but eh, whatever.

http://img209.imageshack.us/my.php?i...6212920rg9.jpg

I'm still playing with it and could likely make better use of my space, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's hard to show off the "fun" features of the UI, since they're all event-driven and reactionary, but I think I've constructed a pretty clean base that the fun stuff can then be layered on top of.

I would love to ditch the block of buttons but I am a notorious clicker of certain things. I am pretty proud of myself for having aspect swap macros setup on a hidden bar, along with some random mod called BookOfTracks which lets me select the tracking options from a menu on the minimap button. Still haven't found a proper way to use traps that isn't just clicking on them, and stuff like TSA I just can't not click. Once every 30 mins? Eh I'll just click it rather than waste a bind. :(

@ Selece or whoever knows: What are those consumables buttons in the top left of your screenshot? And also, I know this is a nub question, but what are your raid unit frames (everyone has them but me!) ? I'm looking to update my raid UI.

It is such a strange question to me in the end. I could show you my UI but without the keybindings or the literally thousands of hours of muscle-memory it is meaningless.

Displaying information can be done in a lot of ways, but even that is only so good as the person who knows to look for what and where. Reacting to that is an even worse scenerio.

Do I have to download a seperate mod for AG raid frames? I got AG Unitframes but no raid frames show up when I'm in a raid. :(

The raid frames are hidden by default I believe - do /ag_unitframes config and navigate to the raid menu.

I admit AG_UF sure do look promising and I hope they develop them more. Right now I'm sticking to PerfectRaid which as Selece said can sometimes be tricky on targetting but work a lot better for me than AG_UF. When I tried AG_UF I was sold on first impression of it being a DUF for raid frames (which if anyone would like to do I'd be very grateful) and it felt a little too limited for my likings; and I hated the whole debuff/buff placement. I suppose its nice if you don't mind it taking a big chunk of your screen if you're a healer. I suppose the other non-healing classes don't worry about these things too much as they don't have to stare at them as often . ;) The one thing I really miss about CTRA is the button to switch from class to Group view. If anyone knows a script I could use in PerfectRaid throw me a PM.

I've seen a few movies floating about (mainly warlocks - not sure why) with people having thier buttons toggled off now. The problem with Hybrid classes was normally that we ended up with masses of buttons because we supported a number of roles. The way I got by that was (with DAB) to have all my buttons target specific. So that I could have Smite bound to the same button as Heal x depending on who my target was, with certain default combinations on no target selected. (having Fear bound to the same button as Fade is not a good idea BTW) This pretty much halved the number of buttons I had present on my screen and is about as sophisticated as my UI gets, so its really not worth posting.

If I could really recommend doing anything to your UI as a healer it would be to scale it all down. I remember starting out in MC barely being able to see a thing and now I have everything bar my RaidFrames and MTT in one of those funky Viewport boxes at the bottom of my screen. I can heal and see what happens.<3

how did you get sprocket autobar to work. I've been trying for a long time.

Definitely not a 'new' idea, but it irks me to see people with these UIs that take up 3/4 of the screen that don't use any kind of Viewport so that they can actually see anything. I'm not sure if people always realize what they're missing. If you have bars and chat boxes and unit frames all along the bottom half of your screen, make the viewport smaller and take up the top half! You'll be seeing less per pixel, but your overall viewing area increases dramatically.

Example:



The first image is my normal Viewport setting - none of the screen real-estate for seeing in-game happenings is lost (It's 'blank' on top and sides because when raiding that's where all of my health bars and unit frames go), and in the second one the darkened overlay shows which parts of the screen are completely covered up when I'm raiding, and thus which things you can NOT see without using viewport. If that Stormpike Emissary were a mob on a raid running for me, I'd much rather be able to see it, than not.

Again, nothing new, but probably one of the biggest things that I see most people not doing that would actually help while playing.

Honestly I don't know how new this is at this point, but this UI shot is back from late April and was I think before HUDs really took off. It's a hacked version of the beta of Nurfed HUD that is also modify to color gradiate and disappear when OOC (GREAT in combat warning). The only thing really different about it, or was at the time, is the placement of some of my DUF frames. I have Target, underneath which is Target's Target, smack dab in the center. On the left I have, going left, my debuffs, then my buffs. On the right, mobs debuffs, then buffs. As a MT/RL I find this fairly important. The only significant change to my UI since this time is having NECB on the left over my chat panel.

Heh...only one of those mages is still with us. QQ

[Edit] The debuff you see on the bottom of the HUD there is TT debuffs. Made that modification right before my first Ebon attempt. One thing I've been wanting for a while is a HUD that had Player, Target, and TT from the outside in, so far nothing that looked halfway decent has had that and I don't want to go hacking another mod, don't have time for it right now. Ideally while tanking it would look like my own health/rage bars surrounding that of my target and it would give me a nice quick alert when my target has changed (aside from the name in the center).

I manually set up a sprocket with my consumables and then set that menu to pop up on ctrl-space. It's not quite autobar, since I have to set it up manually, but my consumable loadout doesn't change a whole lot, either.

Did you even read the original post?

This might be a bit OT, but since this is sort of a discussion on human interface design and data display, I think it's vaugely appropriate.

My currently UI is nothing special, clunky even, certainly not worth a screenshot- CTRA, CTmod, some version of enemy cast bars, and la vendetta primarily for the automatted whisper reply when people bug me mid raids (seriously my favorite feature ever in a bossmod). I've never been overly satisified with it, and use a combo of numerics, alt numerics, and clicking.

After reading through this thread, I've started making a list of what I as a healer, and hopefully soon to be healer dpser, really want to be able to divine, and quickly. Obviously some of it is impossible due to lag, resources, and the soon-to-be new system of restrictions as to what UIs can and cannot do (by choice, while I know mods of this sort will continue to be useful for more than a trivial amount of time, I find myself more drawn to the restricted subset).

I'm not looking for a specific listing of mods (though hey, if someone wants to list some good ones...), but rather a slightly more specific listing of some of the general ideas outlined in deets's post.

In any case, here are some of my thoughts of things I'd like to see in a 'perfect' UI:

1) A targeting system incorporating data about a mob. From selfbuffs to debuffs to target to visual indications of threat, what sort of thing is 'useful' to know about a mob? What's an efficent way of displayingthis- perhaps the frame goes from green->red (slow fade) as you crawl up a threat meter, and flashes red once for instant targets...a counter that simply displays the number of debuff slots free on the mob (only noting the key ones -not- being on there, eg sunder/CoE/ect). What sort of interesting things can we do with main assists- show the proximity to the target? His/her threat? Time targeted? What would be an interesting and efficent system to display this data? Should we have a second targeting system using the Focus mechanic?

2) Raid windows: While most dps classes and many tanks seem to turn off thier raid bars, I like the concept of unobtrustively giving the basic raid info. What sort of info is relivant? HP/mana of the raid in general, threat, relative proxmity to each other (loves me some CH), who's healing which target, status of fellow healers, who's in danger and who's not (highly subjective, I know). Relivant debuffs, decursable debuffs, ect. 40 names in boxes (or 25) is a trainable skill to absorb data from, but is there a way to present this info in a manner which is more readily interpreted? How about targeting- while clicking on the names is fairly intuitive, that limits to what they can do, and requires double attention defocus (moving the mouse + scanning for the relivant name). Would colorizing various aspects of this according to critera be useful, to snag the eye in a more clean manner? Perhaps a system to simply click through all the warriors/rogues/ect by having a simple expident of having a button marked 'warrior'...

3) Current relivant status: Health, mana, combo points, what your'e casting, how much more you can cast, ect. I actually find the mechanisms for this one to be the most sophisticated and intuitive, but as I sad- I use a clunky simple system. What sort of things would be nice here that don't exist, or do people find that visuals are lacking in informational content?

Sorry if this stuff is things people dont' care about, but I think the idea of shaping interfaces into a more streamlined and simple and above all informative system is extremely interesting. While everyone who posted on this thread probably has a better interface than mine in that sense, but what do you people think might be elegant and simple ways to display information to allow quicker understanding?

Oh...and it owuld be nice to remove clutter so some of us could actually see the encounters, but that's another discussion. *grin*

I'm rambling, so here's hoping this brings ideas to the forefront. Be it something you wish you'd seen, a random thought you had once, to...whatever.

I've modified ElkBuffBars to use a user-defined sort for the buffs. Right now, it's pretty simple: all of the 60-minute raid buffs are at the top (Fort, GOTW, AB, DS), followed by all Pally blessings. Everything else goes below, sorted by MAXTIME, then alphabetically.

My main reasoning for it is that I always found it time consuming to search through all 16 buffs to see if I have all of the blessings I should. Now they're all side-by-side and I can tell much more quickly. It's fully customizable for personal preference - rogues/warriors might want Battle Shout on top always, followed by TSA and Aspect of the Pack, for example.

http://show.imagehosting.us/show/169...-1_1699320.JPG

This is a sample just showing the basic idea.

Does anybody besides me find this interesting/appealing?