I don't know if anyone has specifically addressed fury warrior UI functionality, but since it's a class that requires a ton of cooldown babysitting I thought I'd throw mine up.
http://i29.tinypic.com/t8698h.jpg

Everything you need is centered around the player - I never have to take my eyes focus off of what is going on in the game world. Rage management is so important in this style of play that I can't imagine not having a rage bar sitting on top of your toon. Anyways, all the best.

Im thinking healer layout.



Lots of focus in the same place, down right.

Somewhat like this:
http://i27.tinypic.com/21aahrs.jpg

I dont use actionbars, but they can be placed bottomleft.

Aswell other raid mods can be placed topright.

Unitframes and raid etc must be in bright colors to easily notice on health drops

Somewhat like this guy's raidframes coloring
http://images.my-ro.net/image.php?id...e520e8085c0bd3

I also love that orange color, so im keen on going for it on my druid UI

Wouldn't you want more of your focus towards the middle of your screen?

My player/target frames, Grid and essential elements are on the bottom-right of my screen. I prefer the centre to be as empty as possible.

I hated having Grid in the centre, it took up far too much space. It's not so bad in 5 or 10 mans, but 25+ it just takes up too much space right in my face - for AV it's horrible. Keeping it to one side works well for me. This kind of layout probably seems odd and/or stupid to most people who prefer everything to be central, but that's what this thread is all about - discussing UIs that don't have everything bottom-centre, yet still work.

I really need to stop reading this thread... every time I do, I start wondering how I could rework my UI. I wanted to play my alts this weekend, now look what you've all done.

I've been experimenting with taking my block of spell bars & unit frames and rearranging them as well.
I think the major hurdle is training your brain where to look after a swap.
I find my eyes always try to wander to where the info used to be, not where it is now.
Any location on the screen is feasible as long as your brain and your eyes know right where to go when they need a particular bit of information.
That's my major interface design principle.

I think Imbar is right. Im using mostly the defaulted layout with all my buttons, minimap, ect centered.

I've tried different ones.

My major issue is that it gets too cluttered up and I lose track of important info - IE my health ect.

I think I may just be using the wrong addons or devoting too little time to it though. I cant seem to get my UI how I'd like it to be.

I think the point of having things more centered on your UI is exactly so you can see what's happening in front of you and being able to watch bars. This becomes even more prominent on larger monitors. The farther your eye has to travel to get to needed information, the worse your reactions are.

My theory on information placement for a UI is that if my monitor is X wide and Y tall, I have an square in the middle half as tall and half as wide (1/2 X, 1/2 Y), anything I need to see quickly (grid, target health, my health, short buffs/debuffs, raid warnings, etc.) needs to be in that area. Anything I don't need to see as quickly/frequently (map, long-term buffs, action bars, DPS bars) can occupy that exterior area. Yes, this set up takes a while to get used to, but I've found it so much more useful in the long run.

[e] My need to know what's happening around me, even if I"m heal-botting, stems from my role as a raid leader. I suppose if you don't have that level of responsiblity towards the rest of your raid you can get away with putting Grid in a corner, but I still think you're missing out on a lot of information.

I think this means that dps/tanks and healers will have greatly different UI's. This shouldn't be surprising but what I do find astonishing is how many people use the same UI packs with the same basic layout without putting some fairly basic thought into what they do.

I have grid center bottom of my screen since this is what I stare at. From here the important things are close to grid and the not so important things are off on the sides. Emphasised BigWigs bars are in the middle of my screen. This type of setup is what I would consider to be good practice for a healer.

A DPS class on the other hand I would expect them to put raid frames off in the corner and try to keep cooldown bars, dot timers and possibly an action bar in the middle of the screen. In some ways as a healer I am envious since this setup allows a DPS class to create much cleaner UI's. I'd probably expect that Omen/KTM go somewhere in the middly too and would say that the players healthbar should be somewhere in the middle. This setup lets dps watch themselves more carefully.

A tank I would argue is fairly similar to a dps class except for I would argue that a tank needs to have more situational awareness "helpers" in the middle. Target of target and possibly some small raid frames primarily to show aggro on various targets in the raid. In effect this allows tanks to watch their surroundings more carefully.

I do use the same UI for Tanking, DPS, and Healing (major altism here). This does lead me to having a lot of extra information for a given role, but allows me to swap roles without major UI changes.

Quick thought, not sure if there's an addon to do this, but is there a way to put a message such as 'resist' 'dodge' 'parry' etc.. on top of a hotkey for the corresponding ability? With the way my UI is set up it seems like it'd be a good place for such a message especially if you could get it with decent contrast to see it with perhipial vision.

Flashing colors, or dots somewhere on the hotkey button would work too.

You could do this with Mik's Scrolling Battle Text.

Create an event for each of the abilities you wanted to track, and then assign them to output to individual scrolling areas you would place over your hotkeys. I haven't tinkered very much with the new event system that was introduced recently, but it should be possible.

I've written a recent blog post on Action Bars which fits nicely with some of the things talked about in this thread:

omgphatloots.org Blog Archive In Defense of Action Bars

You make a couple interesting points but I really think it depends on what class you play and whether your primarily doing pve or pvp. Range is the one thing you can't easily get around (at least, I haven't found an elegant solution to it) which is why I have two buttons showing on my UI (one for chain lightning, one for earth shock).

Playing as resto in a primarily pve setting, I don't think your point on cooldowns applies to me. I have 4 things in a fight that I will put on cooldown (things like heroism, fire elemental I don't show on my cooldowns). Natures Swiftness, Mana Tide, Drums of Battle, Mana potion. It's definitely a quick glance to look at a list of a maximum 4 different cooldowns. And my cooldown timer doesn't duplicate cooldowns (it won't show earth shock/frost shock/flame shock every time you hit one of them.

I don't really have any conditionals so that doesn't apply to me.

What you said about Power I definitely agree with if your playing a melee class. But I don't think your entire argument is applicable to all situations.

- you should decrease your unitframes they overloaded as a raid player you have to know rarely @ how many percent a boss actually is... isnt enough when the boss dies? know what i mean?
- why do you have grid activated as a hunter? (i play a hunter to, but never needed that - my view)
- your buff corner is too much at all... try to decrease the scale... another layout or whatever
- do click your buttons with mouse or are you a buttonplayer? in case of buttonplayer lower the scale of ui so you get more space at your screen
- furthermore you fairly got no bossmods, do you? -> thats a now go... get a bossmod like... bigwigs (i would recommend you)

Several bosses have events that trigger at certain health percentages, Leo, Vashj, Kael, Archimonde, Mother, Illidan, Kalecgos. And on progression it's nice to see a measurable amount of improvement between attempts.

Grid or any type of raid frames is almost essential in my opinion. Knowing who is alive or dead or has aggro can let you know if you need to adapt or cover for someone. If you'd have party frames out taking up just as much space why not see your whole team?

And I see DBM or BW under the buffs.



As for my suggestions, try a buff mod like Satrina's Buff frames, extremely customizable, and wond take up as much screen space.

Try keybinding and hiding some of your abilities. Put other rarely used ones on a frame that is hidden until mouseover. Bongos3 action bars or Opie can help with that.

Move your tooltip to its own location. In general, things start looking messy and cluttered when they overlap.

Put Fubar items that you don't need to see all the time into the top bar and tell it to autohide. Move the ones you like to always see into the bottom bar. The goal is to see more of the environment.

Shrink the size of everything and remove that bottom panel. Grid frames could be a little smaller so could the minimap, and cast bar. You could show less lines in the damage meter and Omen too.

Remove repetitive or useless information. Do you need both the HUD and your player unitframe? Do you need to see tps in Omen? Do you need percentages always showing in your damage meter? Do you need your Menu bar showing?

Yarrgh. I use one smallish bar for ranges and cooldowns on spells and items as well as clicking potions and certain situational macros and stuff (example). I stopped using bars for cooldowns and such when I realised I get no information on how much time is left on them at a glance without numbers.

If you can put a dogtag on Aloft, I made something like this a while back in the Dogtags 3.0 thread, to go in tooltips.

So does anyone have any idea if this is possible, or a way to get around it if its not? to clarify The agro mark needs to be visible on the nameplate without having to mouseover it.

Whatever you have visible all the time on your Aloft (name, level, whatever), you can add Contrail's tag to the end of that visible tag. If you're in the Waterfall/Niagara menu (or whatever you use), expand all the options for that tag until you see the box to edit & add custom text". In there you should be allowed to add tags to define what shows.

For example:
Aloft -> Name Text -> Advanced -> Format box, add your text in here.

Memory itself isn't that much of a concern really, to me. I've just found out through all my testing that most of the time a smaller memory footprint means less code which means less CPU cycles used by the addon, which is one of my biggest concerns. You'll often find two addons that provide the same functionality, but the one using less memory is most likely coded in a much more efficient manner. So the memory footprint serves as an early indicator of the author's coding efficiency. If you compare ag_UnitFrames to most of the other UF-addons out there you'll see what I mean.

Personally I've found that having too much stuff in the middle is much more distracting than it is useful. I like to have a clear view so I can easily see what's going on in the fight, where AoEs land, where mobs are running etc. I also have the opinion that putting stuff like player- and targetframe in the middle isn't very useful, especially not in a PvE environment. Checking health that often is rarely needed, and I monitor mana/rage/energy on the action bar. It shows amount of casts left for a given spell on the button which is all the info I really need.
I only place stuff in the middle of the screen if it requires constant attention and very high accessibility. This means castbar, debuff timers and grid if I'm healing.

I've been reading this thread off and on for some time, I take pride in the usability of my interface. What frustrates me is the simpleness that DPS classes can get in their interface for raiding purposes versus what a healer requires. The amount of information that a DPS class needs is in-proportionate to the amount of information that a healer needs. What follows is an obviously diverse notion of what a good UI will look like.

In the threads scattered around the web of "look at my UI" I see dozens upon dozens of screen shots of DPS classes with no raid frames (I don't quite understand that, even rogues need to be able to see whats going on to a raids status). Meanwhile I see healers with thousands of buttons of the screen and odd placement of unit frames all over the place. In Andrast's post, I believe he nailed it on the head in terms of how a healer interface "should" be. Unit frames (my preference being Grid) centered on the bottom of the screen, emergency actionable keys directly above that, cast bars/targeting off to the sides of this information, everything else farther out to the edges.

What makes me laugh is the regular placement of the mini map in the center of peoples interfaces. Do people actually use that in a raid? As a healer I am usually in the back, so my view port has an excellent overview of raid positioning and what not, small dots on a small map seem entirely unreliable to get a view of the situation. It would seem DPS could reverse the camera to get a similar overview (or a side view if they need to be able to reposition their location based on boss strategies). The mini map on my screen is attached to toogle/dash and hidden entirely; basically functioning as a place for my mini-icons to be attached to.

I find UI theory and design an important aspect of the game. Many a times I've had to sit down with new healer recruits and investigate why they are being terrible on a boss fight. Quite a few of the times it's turned out that their interface was what was holding them back. A usable interface with quick access to pertinent information can be the difference between a merely successful player and an amazing player your guild can't do without.

I agree with every statement you have Feya, I believe overall healers would be much more efficient if they took more time looking into their UI's.
Another key aspect is keybindings, bind keys properly.
And the mini map must be the most useless piece of a healer's UI.