I'm trying to gather as much info on the *why* ppl setup their UI like they do instead of only the *how* they set it up. I'm trying to find the "must" and the "must not" do-es and don'ts. I wanna do this because what i wanna do is create a base UI with the important stuff in place provide it to the guild.

I know that Ace2 based UI provide a lot of flexibillity and a lot of people use those mods. This isn't what i am looking into. What i seek is, what are the basic things you need to have in a UI and what are the things to avoid.

UIs are used and design with several things in mind, Class and it's role, PvP or Raiding / 5mans.

My questions are:

1) Do you have multiple UI profiles setted up so you can reload a UI design based on if you are PvPing, Raiding, or 5 Manning. -or- Do you Have 1 and only UI that does it all with hiding frames and rotation on bar pages, or just have ALL your buttons showing?

And what is the reason for such a choice?

2) What do you consider the most important stuff to have in a UI, what you consider usefull but not required. What's the bare minimum you would be comfortable with?

3) The important stuff identified in 2) where do you place it and why? (around your character? sides for peripheral vision? top, bottom?)

4) At what point do you consider you have too much info displayed?

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For my part,

1) I have a do-it-all UI with all skills keybound and consumables in a click-able bar. I am startnig to think i should do multiple profile depending on what i am about do. My UI is starting to get pretty heavy in a raid with stuff i dont quite need.

2) I think the Raid frames, with range checks displaying debuffs, displaying HP bars and mana bars of the whole raid are the most important part of my UI. That is because i play a healing class. I feel that the important stuff for me is what i need to see and react to. If i play a warrior i need much more screen to see the 3D world, if i play a healer i need more view over my raid.

3) I keep all the raid tracking stuff on the left so that if i look left i have all i need. Nothing that is relevent to my raid is on the right part of my screen i dont want to miss a burst on a tank or something if i have to turn my head a round.. (i have a big widescreen). A bare minimum for me would be a CTRA type frames because the BLizz ones are just awfull and i have to keep re placing them over and over. On the right is all the configs / inventory / maps and out of combat stuff.

4) When SCT is going too fast 40 raid frames on the left and targets, target of targets and all of that, chat windows.. it feels there is too much things "bleeping" in my screen and i'm thinking of a way to tone it down yet be able to have the info at the same time.There is too much when i see stuff happenning that isnt affecting me (i.e someone is cursed, nothing i can do about it.)

I try to follow pretty standard rules of UI design; visually, the more important immediate access to a piece of information is, the closer it is to the center of my screen (so my/target health/energy/CP/Slice and Dice/Find Weakness timers sit mid-screen, target/target'starget just below that, timerbars/castbars sit a little to the right, SCT in an arc along the top, debufffilter's output just to the left of my HUD, etc.). As it gets less important that I immediately be able to access it, it moves further away. As a rogue, raidframes get stuck in a corner. Chat sits in a corner as well, and I use chattabs to seperate out various methods (a tells frame, a clique frame for various private channels, etc.). Along the bottom sit unitframes, focus, etc. Map in the upper right corner, buffs display sits along the right edge, etc.

But basically, I try to follow a simple rule of: the more important it is that I see it right away, the less distance my eyes should have to travel away from dead center to see it.

First: I play a holy/disc Priest that pretty much just does 5-mans and has just now started getting enough people together to run UBRS, so I imagine my answers will reflect a very different playstyle from most of the folks on EJ. In fact I _just_ began using raidframes this past monday on our first UBRS run.

I don't use multiple profiles. I have 1 and only 1 UI that does pretty much everything I need to, and I basically keep all my buttons showing. I used to use Insomniax & Discord Frames. I'd have 5 rows of 12 buttons with my guild/whispers/channels on the left, and combat spam on the right. The reason for me to do things that way is that I started off soloing 90% of the time, and just added spells to the spell bar as necessary, and over time I've developed quite the muscle memory for where certain spells are, and if they aren't there, I get totally screwed up. It's probably not the most efficient way to set things up, but it ensures I am less likely to fuck up wildly in the heat of battle.

Bare minimum for me in any grouping situation where I'm healing: PartyBars/Benecast. I didn't use any of the fancy features of Benecast, but I absolutely relied (and still rely) on having buttons next to each member's health, so I can click the pretty icons. I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of healbot, but somehow click-casting bugs me. I think it's the lack of a visual cue to feel like I know, for sure, I'm casting the right spell. That and having multiple rows of buttons so I can stack up all my abilities and have them in plain view (out of sight, out of mind, for me). What's really useful but not required is having the Benecast/Partybar feature where the cure disease/dispel magic buttons don't appear next to a player frame unless they've got a debuff up I can cure with them. Truthfully, it makes it much easier to track, visually, than checking for buffs.

Much like you, I put everything on the left side of the screen. The right side is for my buff counters, which I don't give a crap about except as between-fight checks for whether or not I need to throw Prayer of Fortitude back up. My guild/party/raid chat, party bars, and first two raid groups (since I've only done UBRS, I don't even have the other raid groups configured to display) are all on the left. It verges on cluttered when I'm in a group with a lot of pet classes, but I like it so far.

I haven't quite hit that point yet, but it's getting close. I turned off target of target of target because that seemed silly. The big one for me is that I have my party frames cranked up to gigantor size so I can try to assuage my paranoia that I might miss someone's health going down. As I get used to the new UI & mods I'm using after this most recent patch, I think I'll calm down a lot more. I just hate screwing up, so I have my UI tuned to show me maximum information and present the important stuff at the largest size I can manage.

I am considering trying my hand at dumping party bars and eliminating my group's bars at some point, to start getting used to healing via HealBot & raid groups exclusively, though. I can already tell that in anything bigger than a 10 man, I'm not going to have the screen real estate to see everything I need to, let alone everything I want to. (and I'm running on a 24" widescreen lcd)

1) Do you have multiple UI profiles setted up so you can reload a UI design based on if you are PvPing, Raiding, or 5 Manning. -or- Do you Have 1 and only UI that does it all with hiding frames and rotation on bar pages, or just have ALL your buttons showing?

I only have one basic set up. I even use it cross class. I want to always be able to look in the same place and expect the same thing. I even match my keybindings as best I can cross class. Wand is always 1, Sheep/Banish/Shackle are always the same keybind, major nuke always in the same place, etc. I generally have all of my buttons showing all of the time. I think it makes my reaction times faster because I'm never totally surprised when changing between mains and alts (omg I thought that was shackle teehee. No.) because everything does something basically relative. F5-F12 are the unique class keybinds (healing for my priest, aoe for my mage, dots for a warlock) but agian the emphasis is placed in the same way across characters (F5 and F8 are my primary heals, those keybinds also control my main dots on my warlock and my main aoe spells on my mage)

It can pose flexibility problems when leveling a new class and/or adding new skills into the mix... but overall it works well.

2) What do you consider the most important stuff to have in a UI, what you consider usefull but not required. What's the bare minimum you would be comfortable with?

Can't survive without movable unit/raid frames unfortunately. It's the only thing on Beta that I truly mourned when I was forced back to the base ui. Useful but not required: Mods for- Bar, Buff, Minimap, Gearswap, Bag/Bank, Tooltip, BossEncounters, HUD, and a fubar style mod with general information. Bare minimum for comfortable- Unitframes/Raid/Bar/Minimap/Bag/Bank

3) The important stuff identified in 2) where do you place it and why? (around your character? sides for peripheral vision? top, bottom?)

Edges of the screen- I like having the area immediately around my character free of anything but the hud (and I keep my hud small and at half alpha). I generally keep all bars/unitframes/buffs/chat (set to only see important info) in the same general area for easy eyeball access (Left side of the screen for me), and damage meters/bg maps/SCT spam/ SCTD spam -stuff that I only occasionally need to see or that's super spammy- on the opposite side of the screen at half alpha so I can tune it out unless I need it.

4) At what point do you consider you have too much info displayed?

As a healer there's almost no such thing as too much information. If the information impedes my ability to see my immediate surroundings or do my job, I'll generally look for ways to cut it back. Simple ex: I'm doing a lot more dps in raids than I did pre2.0 and VE spam was making it impossible to see my character- so I moved it to the far right and left the center free again.

One of the hardest challenges in creating a unique UI, is not the function, but form. I have seen a few UI's manage to achieve this through excellent choice of mods that have a similar aesthetic, or a bit with discord art. Overall it isn't something we have seen a lot of until recently, and a lot of it is just plain tacky and distracting when subtle elegance would do better (it's a UI, not a Vegas casino).

I have only seen one mod that redoes the UI art for character window, social, etc...and that was a pretty ugly one. Just a grey box instead of art. It is certainly a blank slate as far as UI's go, and probably where my next challenge lies now that I am happy with the function and general appearance of my UI.

Look at your screen and question every part whether or not you actually need to see it. You said it yourself that nothing on the right side of your screen is relevant to your raid. Why is it there at all?

- A lot of people insist on displaying the combat log, after thinking about it for a while I decided to hide it, I'm not missing much.

- Grid really opens eyes for a lot of people used to standard/CTRA raid frames. You can customize Grid exactly in a way to only display information you need to know - stuff you can do something about. It's not perfect, but it definately gets you thinking.

- Why do you need to see people's mana?

- Do you really need the party frames? I use Grid for everything now.

- Unit frames is probably is where I see people waste the most space. Do you really need the 3D portrait, current hp, total hp, and percent hp all at the same time?

Me personally, I use one UI for everything, allthough I imagine creating profiles for people who have all their bars visible and click a lot of stuff is a good option (only thing I click is TrinketMenu to change trinkets and a few consumables). I feel I've taken a truly minimalistic aproach to my UI keybinding everything including my professions, bags (default is Ctrl+B I believe), spellbook, questlog etc. on top of all the skills I ever use with a few having several ranks all keybound (Shift and Ctrl really helped out here, but I screwed myself out of Clique in the process). My UI looks accordingly with unit frames (myself, target, ToT), Grid, chat, minimap, TrinketMenu, 15 consumables on buttons and nothing else.

The biggest problem I've found with Grid, is it's just too good for how compact it is. You don't want to look anywhere other than Grid window, you can't break it up to plaster half of it on one side half on the other to force yourself to look at what's happening.

e: heh that typo was hilarious

e2: Where I personally put stuff - If you draw a triangle with lower left corner of the screen, lower right corner and center this is where I put all my stuff.

For me, oddly enough, yes. I don't need to see portraits, but I feel naked without seeing current/total and percentage. I don't use it for party/raid, since Grid with Clique is all I'll ever need in that respect, but for myself and my target, I like having a bit of information overload. I like seeing that after casting X, I dropped y% mana, so I can spam it Z number of times before being OOM. Seeing the totals is nice for "have I used enough to pop a potion to start timers as soon as possible without wasting part of the potion?"

1. I have a single UI for all, because I like knowing (w/o thinking about it) exactly where to get the information I need or what button casts what spell. It goes back to committing information/responses to memory and muscle-memory.

2. As a healer, I feel there's almost no extraneous information with the exception of seeing my keybound buttons/macros. I don't display any of those, because I know where they are and I've got almost everything bound to a key + modifier.

3. Important stuff goes in the center around my character slightly faded and fades even lower when not active, other necessary stuff goes to the bottom. After AQ and pvping for a while, I could not tolerate obstructing too much of my view. The top and sides of my screen are bare.

4. If I can't just look at the screen and take it all in, then my UI gets tweaked further. If I have change where I'm looking at the screen often, then it's too cluttered or not organized properly, but there is almost never too much information. It's a different story on my mage and lock.

I tend to have one UI for everything. Raid frames are hidden in normal combat, party frames are hidden in Raid, but for the most part everything else stays the same.

I think it's easier to have to use one interface instead of two or three. My UI is designed to allow me to have access to all of my necessary spells and abilities (which tend to change from Raiding to PvP, but thats why you can do action bar paging).

I use an Alphagrip to play WoW, so the single most important thing to me is a good button layout matching my Alphagrip. This is why you'll always see my UIs with (one or two) blocks of 16 buttons. Also, everything necessary for combat should be in my own particular "regular" spots that I tend to look for such information, or should be painfully obvious otherwise. I'm a creature of habit, I look to specific places on my screen for specific information and if it's not there, it throws me off.

I tend to place my important UI elements on the bottom or top of the screen preferably, expanding down or up on the left or right edges as necessary. I do this because I like having a wide angle view around my character. I've also extended my zoom-out distance quite a bit so I can get a good overhead view to see what's going on around me. Situational awareness is key.

If it's cluttering my viewport to the point that I can't have good situational awareness, it's too much. Otherwise, it's fair game. I'm always trying new mods, so I have a pretty easy time getting rid of crap I don't use in favor of something I might, but at some point the clutter just gets to be too much and I start over.

I think this is a great guideline, but it raises a problem as a healer: Where do you put your health bars?

At least 90% of my time is spent staring at them. So, logically, they should be front and center, right? But I just can't get a good setup that does that for me and still lets me see the game.

PerfectRaid and now Grid have been evolutionary steps for me in terms of how much screen real estate I devoted to health bars, but even the hyperminimalist Grid is a pretty hefty thing to be putting dead center.

I end up with the health bars thrown to one side of the screen, and a serious case of bar-vision. (Maybe with only 25 bars in my Grid in TBC it will get even better-- we'll see.)

Any healers out there with a set-up that makes both health bars and the rest of the game easily visible?

I probably like most healers spend many fights focusing on raid bars mainly and not much else (if its not around the raid bars I just don't see it). A problem arises from this thou. During geddon for example who turns you into a bomb or Vael I have before completely missed the fact I got the debuff since I was focusing so much on the raid and killed a few people.

I took this into account when designing my UI for 2.0.1. So describing my changes I answer your 2nd question. What I planed to do was focus the important stuff that I need to raid all around one part, this was the bottom and right side of my screen. Casting bar/raid frames/current target (usually the tank)/ chat/spells I havn't keybinded/buffs/etc. All located on the bottom or right side of my screen so I can simply focus in one area with out having to pay much attention.

example: http://img379.imageshack.us/img379/8...sectionjt3.jpg

To answer the 4th question. I consider to much info displayed when at a quick glance of the surroundings I can barely see whats going on. A Lot of: healing spells/pots on my bars, sct spamming with your heals,mana regen,large raid/unit frames can do this. Another fault of my old UI I noticed which I've tried to limit via macros/keybindings and scaling.

I would like to throw a question out there, as you could see from my screenshot I am using ct_viewport to other users of similar addons why do you use them? I never really thought of it until now talking about maximizing as much of the screen space as possible when this addon limits certain areas of the screen into a black bar. For me I guess it just looks more organised and the loss of space is at an acceptable level. Other peoples thoughts?

the removal of combat log is a good idea, with SCT/SWS/etc it serves a questionable function, at best you can stash it in a tab of your chat area. i think i'll drag it off and put sws there.

what about fubar/titan? I find it very useful as a sort of "dashboard", I try to keep it to just 1 line and only put in mods that are really useful. currently have location, honor, fps, mr plow, bigwigs/ora2, bartender, skinner, deucecommander, durability, bags, money, and clock on my fubar.

i dumped a hud long ago, just found it cleaner to have ag unit frames in a very simple style, as close to center area as possible. is a hud a good idea or not?

lastly, viewport? i really like having my buttons, map, and chat window "outside" the game view, especially since i never look behind them. on the other hand i can see how it removes game immersal. tough one.

and yes i try to make my ui so that most important things are all in one area, center-bottom. dashboard at the top with stuff like fps and control functions (deucecommander, ora2, bartender, prat menu). XRS replaces grid and the like for me, all I really care about is how many ppl alive, what healer & DPS mana is, how many tanks alive, and so on.

i have way to many buttons at the moment playing my warlock, even with shardAce its a nightmare. really need to sit down and consolidate this, I recently got a new G15 keyboard so probably going to spend some time figuring out best way to use the extra 18x3 keys.

In my opinion, the goal for all UI's should be getting the most information available with as little repetition as possible. I won't link screenshots of my UI's, but I'll use them as examples in saying that, originally, I had a ton of information duplication. My player frame was in the top-left corner of the screen, containing my XP bar, name, level and class, health, mana, and portrait. Ditto for the target (sans the XP bar). Who really needs all that? Especially because, in addition to those things, I also had StatusBars showing duplicates of almost all that information right in the middle of the screen during combat. Horrible, horrible inefficiency.

Now, I have a HUD mod. Why HUDs? Well, because they display the most relevant information front and center. When you're in the middle of combat, your goal should be to spend as much time looking at the actual combat as possible, and as little time looking at your UI as possible. If you have to stare into the top-left corner of your screen to find information about yourself and your target, then you're creating a severe tunnel vision problem for yourself. You can put your player and target frames in the center of the screen, sure, and then it pretty much is the same as having a HUD (and much better than having them in the top-left corner). Pretty much the only difference between a HUD and unit frames is that the HUD usually occupies less screen real estate (but it's not always the case).

With respect to other unit frames, what do you really need to see? I noticed a post above said you could just use Grid and have it suffice for parties as well, but personally I think that parties require slightly more micro-management, and since there's only 5 people in a party, there's nothing wrong with taking up a little more space for your party frames. In my opinion, your four party frames and player frame should add up to take about as much space as your raid frames. Neither should be too big. In a raid, you really just need to see each player's health and applicable buffs and debuffs (since you need to be space-efficient, probably limited to just those you can cast/cure). Mana might also be necessary if you're a druid. In a party, though, you can show more stuff, including mana/rage/energy and all buffs and debuffs. You may ask why -- I would ask why not?

The key is simply to be space-efficient in whatever you do. Don't duplicate information. Don't waste space between UI elements where it isn't needed. Don't waste space on elements that aren't needed. Portraits? Kill 'em. Do you really need to know which member of your party is the loot master? Which one is the leader? Wouldn't you already know these things, being in a party? Do you need to know which are flagged for PvP? Maybe. Which are in combat? Definitely. Prioritize the things you need to see and organize them in a way that puts the most important things in the most obvious positions.

In my opinion, Titan Panel/FuBar are the best thing since sliced bread. Here are two mods which simply occupy a small strip of screen space along the top or bottom of your screen, and can display a great wealth of information, or even provide functions beyond simply information-collecting. A ton of Ace2 mods even plug in to it to provide easy access to functions that are normally buried in less intuitive slash commands.

Regarding action bars and buttons, I like to keep all of mine on screen at the same time, even if I know the bindings by heart. Why? Simply -- I'm human, and humans forget things. If I happen not to recall which, between Alt-2 and Alt-3, was my Vanish key and which was Blind, I don't want to have to dig into my mod to bring up the action bar to find it. I just want to look down and see it. This isn't a big deal, though, because even though I use five action bars plus my stance/pet bars, I have them all stacked neatly in a small space in the bottom-middle of my screen.

Thus end my random thoughts on UI for the moment...

Extending what Vulajin said about fubar, I have my bottom fubar panel to hide until I mouse over it, and then put my 'configuration' plugins in that one, kinda like an auto hiding Windows task bar. That way I have a bunch of configuration options hidden until I mouse over them, hiding them from the screen until theyre needed. Its a good place to throw DeuceCommander, agUF, Bigwigs, Ora2 options that you want to access occasionally, but dont really need to waste screen real estate on 100% of the time.

Regarding raid frames, my experience even before I became a raid leader was I wanted as much information as I could possibly get. So I had health, mana, debuff color, fort, mark and SS. With just one glance over my ctraid frames I could see how the raids health/mana was, how fast debuff removal was going and so on. I had them organised by group so I could immediately see how a corner was going in razorgore or how the OT healer mana was on firemaw.

My motto for my UI was "If I may need to know that information 'right now' at some point then I want it available with just a flick of the eyes".

When you drive a car, your speedometer is not in the upper left near the visor (default gui), your fuel gauge isn't on the passenger side.

Its all centralized. Good guis all share that in common - centralization of data. It should be common sense as to why this is important. I also don't buy the fact that too much information (as long as its not redundant), is a bad thing.

I don't see 747 pilots whining their board shows too much detail. And yes, it is a reasonable analogy. You can play your character just fine with extra stuff showing; and extra information can be very very helpful. Keep the most important stuff centralized, then it should flow outward in a web-page design style from the center (web pages flow like water poured at the upper-left). Spilling from center as information becomes less relevant.

Thats my opinion at least. Edit: I also think its critical to retain 1 gui, and get used to it... especially as it gets more complicated. You really settle into a gui, and that is why so many guilds went slow last week. Relearning takes time. But once you're setup you're just well adjusted to the situation, and when chaos happens (see KT p3) its second nature.

No. One setting per character, and I try to make them as uniformed as possible. Only minor variations between the chars, like as a Mage I don't have any stances so no need for button remaping but as my warrior I need that.

I try to hide as much as possible, I want a small and clean interface. I hate eye candy and think it's a big waste of CPU/GPU and really gets in the way of my wow playing.

In raids I usually show all groups, even if I don't have to as a mage, but that's mostly because I like to know how we're doing and see who's dying like flies and not :) But lately I've valued peace and quiet more than information so I hide the raid frames during trash and during some bosses.

Most important, to see what's happening in the world and that the UI is not distracting me from that. The UI should assist me by presenting extra information in a good non-intrusive way. I hate eye candy and "dead areas", which is why I can't stand the default UI. Too much space wasted with the dragon stuff around the bars, so bare minimum would be a mod to hide the default UI and show (a lot) of small buttons.

I also need a lot of really big chat windows. I don't want to miss anything, so a bare minimum of two really big chat windows up at the same time. The left is for "here stuff" (party/raid/bg/say/emote/etc) and the right is for guild and custom channels.

Around. X offset in SCT is a god send, buffs/gains/damage done to me/etc are shown to the left of my char. Damage I do (SCTD) is shown to the right.

I also wanted a HUD mod, but all the existing ones was so ugly (colourful bars that faded and crap) so I wrote my own that just displays "HP/Max Mana/Max" in normal font just below my char.

When I can't remove anything more without missing it.

I divided my UI in three parts:

The lower part (about 20 % of the full height): All the every-day-use parts and things that are static.
This means the chatframes, which are seperated between open channels (Trade, General, Say, Yell) and closed channels (Raid, BG, Guild, Healers, Class channel, Whisper).
The minimap in the lower right corner, squared. Many say it isn't something important, but as healer I often need to know where exactly my party members are.
Buttons. I have 30 main buttons for all the important functions. I had less before, but due the changes in 2.0 it is no longer possible to show/hide buttons in combat on condition (show healing/buffing spells when targeting a friendly unit, attack spells when targeting a enemey unit on the same space). These buttons I again divide into two parts: spells which don't need a target (AoE, AoE-heals, selfbuffs) and spells that need a target (attacks). The most important spells have a keybinding assigned.
Then I have about 12 smaller buttons which are mostly for control functions: change the layout of Grid, show/hide items, important out-of-combat macros.
XRS to provide all the infomations I need about the raid status in a small compact form: healer mana, raid mana, amount of dead people. Takes up maybe 30x50 pixels and gives me a quick overview over the raid.
I moved the viewport of WoW, so this part has a black background, making it easy to distinguish things and provides a calm view (unlike having all the UI elements put over the worldview and thus hiding information while making the UI elements harder to read)


Just above this I put all the things I need for healing. I am a click-caster (binding heals to mouseclicks with modifier like CTRL, ALT, SHIFT) for a long time now, and I mostly play healer characters, so the unitframes are the most important part of the UI for me. I put all this to the right half of the screen. My own character frame is just left of the center axe, left of it the pet unitframe/petbar (as Priest sometimes needed, but in 99 % of the playtime not used, thus hidden and not in the "focus" part). Just below is Autobar, to collect all my consumerables. If I look at my unitframe, see a problem (health, mana) it is only a few pixels to drink a potion without even needing to use the keybinding to drink.
Above is the focus frame, but mostly because I haven't found a better place yet.
Right of my character frame is the part that usually my eyes lie on: target and target of target. The first one is the most "informative" unitframe I have, showing basically everything possible (portrait, all buffs/debuffs, all status icons, mana, health, absolute values, %...) because it is the most important frame, used to aquire most informations. Just above is the ToT. This way it is easy to monitor the boss and the MT/OT at the same time and switch between them in a stroke. Since click-casting doesn't change your target/doesn't need to change your target it is very easy to heal the tank (in the ToT) and to cast attack spells (enemy in the target frame) at the same time, without pause or need to change target the whole time.
Next to these two important frames is Grid, which is set up to the right edge of the screen, just above the aforementioned black bar. This way it is very easy to reach and see the whole raid by just moving the mouse a few centimeter. Above Grid is the MT window, again easily to reach and see even if I am concentrating on Grid or the target unitframe.
By putting this elements together I can see and reach everything very quickly.

Third part: Any temporary information is in the upper half of the screen.
I put my debuffs dead centre and very, very big just above the central horizontal axis of the screen. This way it is impossible to overlook a debuff on yourself. The buffs are also centre, but far smaller and on the upper edge of the screen, together with Fubar, Resurrection monitor etc., providing informations that don't need to be seen or checked constantly. Usually something I only look on between pulls to make sure I have everything I need.
All cooldown timers, BG timers, bossmod timers are also in the upper left quadrant of the screen. As temporary information they are only usefull in certain situations (bossfights, BGs..) and thus don't need to be directly in my vision the whole time, but should have a fix, easy to see place.
On the left side I usually have another compact raidview, soely for buffing purposes. Usually it was PerfectRaid, currently it is AG_unitframes until PerfectRaid works again. This is only important to make sure that everyone I am assigned to is buffed. I only need them before pulls and they usually stay hidden.
I don't need group unitframes in raid since I have them in Grid anyway.

Any button or function I don't need to see is hidden but easily accessable with Geist, an addon that opens a square with 25 buttons around the mouse cursor on a keypress. There I put all chatmacros, buffs, tradeskills etc. Before 2.0 I used Sprocket for this.

The combat frame is usually hidden, any important information is provided by SCT/SCTD/Witchhunt above my character. This are temporary things that are valid for only a few seconds, no use to have a seperate frame shown all the time to look them up later. The only thing I need to know is a spellfailure by myself, which I routed to the open channel chatwindow.

I share this setup between all characters with small modifications, making it easy to always know where I will find which information, regardless if I am playing a Priest, Paladin, Hunter or Warlock.

1:
As a warrior, with different stance bars, and no requirement for multiple ranks of spells/abilities to be on my bars, I can get away with a single profile.

2 & 3:
The vital information, from my perspective as a Warrior, is the ability to keep track of Dmg taken vs Healing received while tanking. Therefore i have:
- Vertical SCT feed just to the left of my character shows incoming dmg
- Vertical SCT feed to the right of my character shows incoming heals, dodges, parrys etc (and healer name, which I find fairly important as well)
- My dmg is displayed directly above my head (when using SCT) so that it doesn't clutter the other feeds
This means I have, in my peripheral vision, 3 separate (and distinct) streams of information about the damage I'm taking verus the healing I'm receiving. Having this information separated makes a huge difference for me while Tanking.

- Directly below my character I have enemy cast bars. For obvious reasons its important I can see when mobs I'm tanking are about to use various abilities.
- Below the cast bars I have a small filtered debuff window, which only displays 'vital' debuffs. i.e. Thunderclap, demo shout, sunder, Faire fire, CoR etc. So when I'm DPS'ing I can quickly see if one slips off, and call for it to be reapplied if necessary, or if I'm responsible for a debuff I know when I need to reapply it.
- To the left and right of the debuff window I have my Player, Target (and Target of Target) unit frames. These are all quite large, and are well within my peripheral vision, which means I always have a good idea of my health, rage and status of my Target,
- Directly below my the Unit frames are my action bars. I only need them quite central so that I can keep an eye on CD's at a glance. I need to know when revenge, BT, WW etc are lit up.

Outside of my direct peripheral vision are my raid frames (with range check) and combat logs. While I don't often need this information at a glance, its important I have the information easily at hand. Having a the basic status of the raid, knowing which healers are in range of me (if any), is information I need displayed all the time, but don't necessarily constantly check. Therefore my raid bars are on the far left hand side of the screen.

Combat logs are very important for me. I have 2 large windows. 1 displays outgoing damage done by me and the other displays incoming damage and heals on me (with timestamps). The healing vs dmg combat log is the most useful, as if I die while tanking, I can quickly see if I took a huge spike of dmg (and the type) or if I simply didn't receive enough healing. It allows good decision making for the following attempt.

*edit* An Agro Alert is something i couldn't live without either. Knowing when i've pulled agro on a mob during Gothik, or when Heigan (inevitably) takes a liking to me, it's so useful to slam the 'Equip Shield' macro and has saved my life many a time.

That's a good point about the 747 board. I guess, basically, there are two ways to approach it. Mine is, "the more marginal information I can remove to save space, the better." Yours is "the more information I can add without wasting too much extra space, the better." Both approaches are valid; it really depends on what you're comfortable with. Personally, I got tired of playing the game through a viewport artificially reduced by UI elements strewn about the screen, so I adopted my current design paradigm.

Another random thought I'd like to insert: how important do you consider "free edges" of the screen -- that is, edges that are completely unoccupied by UI elements, allowing the screen to run off the edge? I always used to have all four sides of my screen occupied by UI elements, and eventually I came to the realization that my gameplay experience simply felt crowded. At the moment, I keep nearly all of my UI elements along the bottom of the screen. The only exception is my minimap, which for some reason I can't bring myself to move out of the top-right corner. Other than that, the top edge is completely free and the left and right are free down to where my UI actually starts. Almost everything important grows up from my primary UI elements. It's amazing how much more "open" the world feels when it isn't boxed in on all sides by your UI. Viewporting is an option, but it doesn't really change things because your viewing area still gets shrunk by the UI elements; it prevents your UI from getting in the way of activities, but it doesn't actually "free" up your edges.

1) Do you have multiple UI profiles setted up so you can reload a UI design based on if you are PvPing, Raiding, or 5 Manning. -or- Do you Have 1 and only UI that does it all with hiding frames and rotation on bar pages, or just have ALL your buttons showing?

I still have (and have had since I started playing) a single profile for my characters doesn't matter what I am doing, but being mainly a rogue it's pretty much the same in pvp as it is in raiding format. Because not much changes for me from raid to pvp, with the natural paging from stealth to unstealth bars it's pretty easy for a rogue in this respect.

2) What do you consider the most important stuff to have in a UI, what you consider usefull but not required. What's the bare minimum you would be comfortable with?

Essentials are just Player bar and target bar for me, I used to have switchable raid layout for RDX which is now gone so I use a small raid data for hps and mana.

3) The important stuff identified in 2) where do you place it and why? (around your character? sides for peripheral vision? top, bottom?)

Target frame is my most important frame is central but aligned at the bottom (if you were to look at my screen and character it would align just to his knee's) and oversized so I can see what the current target is looking like in terms of mana/health/debuffs. I have target of target offset to the right hand lower down along the viewport line. Also on the left hand side lower along the view port line I have my player frame which again is oversized so I can see presicely what I have remaining. I also use pure numbers backed with a bar which is usually around 75% alpha, so at a glance I can see what sort of shape we are in quickly and if i need presice information it's there in pure numbers.

4) At what point do you consider you have too much info displayed?
Usually at full raid buffing times when I have littered buffs on the right side numbering 15+, I personally dont have anything a smal RDX frame for hp's lost and mana % and a assist window (everything else just seems crap these days), and that's it really.

1) Do you have multiple UI profiles setted up so you can reload a UI design based on if you are PvPing, Raiding, or 5 Manning. -or- Do you Have 1 and only UI that does it all with hiding frames and rotation on bar pages, or just have ALL your buttons showing?
I have one UI for everything. Many action bars are situational (portals, conjuring, fire spells, etc) so I use those on demand.

2) What do you consider the most important stuff to have in a UI, what you consider useful but not required. What's the bare minimum you would be comfortable with?
Your health/mana, casting bar, and opponent's health are important to rearrange for quicker access. Raid frames that you can toggle on and off and toggle group/class sorting are a must for me. A main targets list with the enemies' targets is also a must. Raid communication tools are a must also, but I don't know that I'd call that a UI exactly.

3) The important stuff identified in 2) where do you place it and why? (around your character? sides for peripheral vision? top, bottom?)
I do basically what Kalman said. As a mage, my health/mana, castbar, and opponent's health are the most important things to me, so I use a nice HUD in the middle for all of that. Raid frames are somewhat unimportant (buffing/decursing mostly), so those go on the side. I'd like to have oRA2 main tanks somewhere other than top left corner, but they need space to grow downwards and take up so much space that they have to be away from the center of the screen. When I used CTRA, they would be on the right side cause with MTT on, it would line up roughly with the width of the minimap.

4) At what point do you consider you have too much info displayed?
When either noone is dying or I have something that requires awareness of my area like Nef skellies or something, then I decide that having my raid frames shown is a hindrance. But I can't hide them in combat anymore anyway. Sometimes I feel like I don't need to know the main tanks' HP (an oRA2 thing), but there isn't a way around that. The question is worded differently though - I'd say I realize it when I realize I need more space. At 1024x768, that's fairly often, so I cut out anything I don't use often.