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".

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) 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.

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 try to have one UI that works best in raiding combat (PvE and PvP, although I'd like to see about breaking the two into seperate modes), as this is the most challenging/time-consuming part of my play. I try to go through the effort to minimalize as much of the UI as possible, simply because it forces me to work through what's important, why and where it's important.

I've talked to folks who want "everything" displayed - but for me I find value in the prioritization effort itself. I have a penchant to re-arrange furniture to better suit my living environment IRL, so I suspect some of that is rubbing off here ;)

The one exception to this is when I help/lead a raid. As a raid leader, I find that it's necessary (for our guild) to do a certain amount of cat-herding, and as a result, I like to be able to tell when hour-long buffs are done, what the overall mana levels are for healers, etc. If there was an easy way to have that alongside a regular "playing UI", I'd be very interested.


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?

I can only really speak to the mage class, but in general, I like to have every visible item in my UI to be providing at least 2 things of "value": buttons are only there to tell me range and cooldown (if it's just there to show me what key I should press, that's not enough value-for-real-estate). For food network lovers, Alton Brown hates "uni-taskers"... and anything on my screen that only serves one purpose I generally seek to remove/minimize.

Anything that's not applicable out of my main context (in my case, raiding combat) should be parked away, hidden, usable without visible real estate use. Conjure water? Mana gem? Teleport/Portal? Tradeskill? I use Clique to decurse easily, but I love it more because I never have to see a conjure water button.

Fubar: love it. Always hidden tho until I mouse-over.

List of my minimums (mage): Self, target, ToT, Raid chat, whisper chat, Threat/Damage, minimap, buffs/debuffs, Grid, BG map, BG counter, SCT, minimal buttons, consumables


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

I put all my important stuff in a line down the middle... health and unit stuff is addressed by a HUD. Grid is middle bottom.



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

I waver between having too little and too much. In general, I'd love to have more information (on demand/context)... so I'm regularly moving between adding and removing information.

What I'd love is to have a SuperGrid that gives me high saturated information, but disappears when I don't want it. Key down: show me big boxes that I pre-configure, with buffs, debuffs, mana numbers, health numbers, location, cool downs, soulstones, resistances, etc. Key up, hide all that crap and show me super-efficient grid.