With all these concerns about healer's UI would anyone mind to start a dedicated thread for us and our UI's? So we could discuss our thoughts there rather than clicking pages and pages to find anything related to healer's UI.
Just an idea

I doubt that healer's UI is so different that it would require it's own thread rather than continue to utilize existing threads, particularly as this thread, as it presently exists, would suit those needs just fine.

From my personal experience (as an off-spec, backup healer), the only thing I find necessary (beyond normal raiding needs) as a healer is Grid (or equivalent) prominently placed so that I can clique cast without completely losing track of what's going on in the rest of the fight.

I have a question about background "frame" I see behind many of the action bars in UI screenshots. The only one I have found so far to do this is EE_Panels but it is no longer supported and has been giving me problems in recent patches. Also I have seen ones that look nicer that what I can do with EE_Panels... so I am wondering what else is out there...

Also I want to get ALL my buttons off my mini map and put them on m FuBar, but a lot of the add-on buttons are not showing as available to be on my Fubar... is there something I am doing wrong or should Iuse a different bar addon?

Most use ee_panels, I've been using it without issue, not sure what errors you're experiencing. Care to elaborate?

Still w.i.p.:


Some points on my approach to UI design for WoW:

• UI elements should be located at the edge of the screen. This is tremenously important to maintain a good situational awareness during fights. Only absolutely vital info is allowed in the screen center. Also, I've found that when I am "glancing" for whatever info it doesn't matter much where the info is located. To me it doesn't take more time to glance at the edge of the screen compared to glancing at the middle.
• My UI is fully keyboard driven. I rarely ever click stuff and if I do it is generally out of combat, unless I'm healing. Due to this philosophy mouse distance between most elements isn't really a concern to me.
• Fonts should be as small as possible (to save space) but sharp with no antialiasing. Pixel fonts help a great deal here. To me they are easily readable even at 5pt. Better than most TTF fonts at 12pt even. There should be no more than two different font types used (consistency!) due to the fact that adjusting your eyes to one font is much more comfortable than having like 5 different fonts on screen.
• UI elements should have an opaque background. This blocks some screen real estate but keeps info readable at all times. In my experience transparent backgrounds are bad because they tend to make it hard to read some info when the game world background is extremely bright or dim. Since WoW is a very colorful game this happens quite often.
• Only the most vital info should be visible during a fight. Things like damagemeters are a no go since they do not help me improve my game in combat. They also tend to take focus away from the really important things (raid and debuff timers etc).
• Functionality is king. If an addon does not provide killer functionality in a very lightweight and modular fashion it is not worth the install.

Take a look at kgPanels. It is eePanels successor written by the same author. It's much more consistent and easier to use.

I have a rather general question: why do people use backgrounds for bars that have graphics or textures that obscure the information on the bar?

To pick on Tango's UI, the white-fade in the middle of the LiteStep texture, compounded with white for the text-color, makes it nigh-impossible for me to read vital information (sometimes). For example, looking at this particular screenshot of the UI, I can just barely figure out that Archimonde is at 676.9k health out of 679.4k total, and that's after squinting at the bar for a good few seconds, at a time when the frame is unmoving and the number isn't changing. Similarly, on Omen, I can't even figure out the name of the Paladin who is second-in-threat. I simply can't discern what the third, fourth, and fifth letters are.

I try to go for solid bars, and aim for Bantobar or Tooltip.

Can anyone give any opinions?

It's not about time, it's about where you are focusing. In your particular UI, you have elements ALL over your screen. Having to look in 10 different places just doesn't make any sense, from any standpoint. Keeping your playing space visible while keeping important elements clustered is a very easy thing to do; however, it takes some creativity.

You don't want your focus to become mutually exclusive. By that I mean that you don't want glancing at your unitframe to trade-off dramatically with glancing (a) at the environment and (b) at other important UI elements. You don't have to have everything sitting in the center of your screen in order for it to be "clustered" and useful, but keeping important elements in opposite corners of your screen doesn't help much. When you're looking at something on the screen, you're not focused simply on that object. If your buffs near your UF, for example, you can see your health and power status while checking a buff status. If those elements are located centrally, you can still easily see that doomfire coming from your left and get out of its way.

For the record, your desire to keep a clean environment and use opaque panels seems counter-intuitive.

Unless EvilElvis has changed identities, kg is not maintained by the author of eePanels.

I'm in the same boat. I actually "finished" my Hunter UI last night (pics coming soon, maybe), and the only texture that isn't Bantobar is ArcHUD. That inconsistency exists from a combination of having to create a custom bar texture) and that the way ArcHUD works would defeat my reason for using BantoBar.

I played around with a lot of different textures before settling on BantoBar (in some cases, BantoBarReverse). My decision on the texture came down to four things:

• Readability. While some of the more "complex" textures have a nice graphical sheen to them, they ended up in too much "competition" with the text that is displayed. Since in many cases, the text is the "vital" information while the bar is the "at a glance" information, the text gets priority.
• Simplicity. Web 2.0 is full of glows and shines and all sort of graphical effects that make things look "Web 2.0." While my UI is probably not going to win any awards for modern design, I don't have to struggle through cases where those graphical effects compete with the information.
• Demarcation. It's subtle, but BantoBar has a bright line on the edges. This really helps demarcate bars when you start to have more than a few. In my stack of cooldown timer bars, for example (created with CDT and BantoBar textures), other textures didn't have the "guides" needed, and my eye would keep slipping off to an adjacent bar. Thinking you have a 90 second cooldown on Arcane Shot isn't a good thing.
• Emphasis. The hallmark of the (seemingly simple?) BantoBar texture is the gradient from light to dark. This allows my UI to place emphasis on the end of the bar that is more important. Health bars, for example, have the light end at the low end. If it's me or an enemy, I want that bar to be "brighter" when one of us is almost dead. If a bar's high end was more important (say, a Reputuation experience bar), it got BantoBarReverse to put the bright end at the top. (As an aside, this is where ArcHUD failed miserably. Since it mirrors the arc texture, using a BantoBar style texture would put the bright either at both ends of the arc or just in the center. Neither is what I wanted... and trying IceHUD reminded me that I think it's ugly.)

Consider DaHud (@ Wowace) instead. I didn't try the new version yet (largely because I completely lost all settings when updating to it and going back to the old version had everything showing as should), but it works better than ArcHud or IceHud I'd say.

I quite agree with regards to the solid bars - I tend to pick Minimalist or BantoBar as it makes it a lot easier to pick up at a glance what's going on.

I tested pretty much every layout I could think of and every layout I've seen on the web, so far. In the end I found that it really doesn't make a difference at all. I also think that Blizzard's original layout is actually really good and it follows a very similar approach. This is why I've gone back to keeping mine pretty close to theirs. I also think it's cool if you don't like my approach and care to say so. It's not cool however to try and pretend that you actually know "any standpoint". You don't.

As I said I have tested all types of different layouts in my time and I've found that while a lot of what you're saying seems logical at first, it really doesn't make a difference at all in the end. The way we read and digest info makes it impossible to come up with a layout that allows you to see "everything" at one glance. No matter how much you cluster up or spread out, there will always be a limit to how much text and info you can read in a given time.
Also, if all of what you're saying is true then one has to wonder how Blizzard's UI designers come up with their layout? You know they have some of the best interface designers on the planet working on this stuff, right?

This is quite true but you have to make a compromise at some point. If the tradeoff to keeping as much of the environment visible is making it harder to read info, then IMO usability clearly wins this round. So the compromise is keeping opaque backgrounds while keeping the "area of attention" (the center screen area minus the outer rim) as free as possible.

You're right. However, this is really a matter of personal preference and ability. Me, personally, I have no problem at all to read the info and I simply like the texture, at the moment. In a few weeks, days or minutes even I'm probably going to change it. As I said this is a work in progress. While the concept is pretty much pinned, the look and some of the layout is likely going to change a lot while I improve on it and script the last bits of LUA code. You don't like the texture and I can see why. Luckily we have things like SharedMedia so everyone can use whatever texture he likes best.

Personally I have grown tired of the "simple", "Caith" type of look very very fast. It's just too simple for my tastes. I think it doesn't fit into the game world at all and kills a lot of athmosphere because it looks too modern, too sci-fi and too much like a website instead of a fantasy game interface.

No. When something hits me in the game I will notice in the enviroment. That's the point where I'll take a look at my health. There is no need to monitor health constantly. In my experience this applies to pretty much everything UI related. You really don't need to see everything all the time. Selectively focusing info is much better IMO than clustering everything up even though you won't need most of it during a given monent.

I'm enjoying the discussion that's being had here about healer UIs so far and thought I'd add my two cents. Over my years of healing on my shaman, my UI has undergone a good deal of evolution. The most important element of this evolution, in my opinion, has been the placement of the raid frames and the placement of the action bars.

I, as many other healers have done, started out by placing my raid frames along the left edge of my screen - slightly closer to the top than the bottom. This is done to preserve the feeling of familiarity with having used the default Blizzard UI for levelling from 1-70. Likewise, upon my discovery of Bartender, I like most players tried to maintain that familiar default Blizzard UI comfort zone and put some vertical bars on the right side of my screen, where I put my mana pots and healthstones.

It looked like this: http://img372.imageshack.us/img372/3...7234501io5.jpg

Obviously, the biggest problem I had with this layout was the fact that I had to move my mouse over all the way to the right side of my screen to click a mana potion, and then move it all the way back to the left to click on people to heal. Note that I have a relatively large monitor, it's a 24" widescreen at 1920x1200 resolution.

Around this time I began looking at a little mod named Grid. I never fully caught on to the magic of Grid, and to this day I still don't use it, but I immediately recognized the advantage of setting up my raid frames in a 5x5 "grid". So that's exactly what I did. I put this "grid" of Pitbull raid frames near the bottom left of my screen, right above my chat window. Also this time I decided to put all of my action bars stacked up at the center-bottom of my screen.

Here's what it looked like: http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/240...8232943eb0.jpg

This worked pretty well, but soon I started to develop neck pains from staring at the bottom left corner of my screen all the time. That was when I began to look around these forums more, and I became very inspired by healer UIs that placed their Grid at the center of the screen, right below their character. I thought this was genius - playing with that kind of UI would allow me to both stare at my raid frames and keep an eye on my character at the same time (while avoiding neck pains)!

I decided to take this one step further. Recognizing completely now that raid frames are at the heart and center of any healer UI, it followed very logically that important things to interact with need to be closer to the raid frames, and less important things should be further away. Also, I was never able to get accustomed to hiding action bars, so I decided to "surround" my raid frames with useful stuff like TotemTimers, action bars, player/target frames, etc.

The final result looks like this: http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/2...8012008zm5.jpg (also posted in the Share your Interface thread)

To conclude, I'm pretty confident now that my placement of raid frames is exactly where I want it to be. Other people might be fine putting them in the bottom-left or bottom-right areas, but to me those are not very ergonomic locations and may cause neck pain.

I could probably remove that, but the meters have been pretty baked into my play-style while raiding. It bugs the hell out of me if I can't see my raid's performance, and every time I hide it I always find myself wasting time to re-show it. Yeah I'm probably a meter whore, heh.

Another thing to note about that part of my UI where recount is displayed is the fact that Omen and Recount both take up the same area. Clicking on their respective icons on the fubar panel right below allows me to toggle their visibility on and off. So when I want to look at threat I just toggle my Omen on, and my Recount off. When I want to look at meters I just toggle my Omen off and my Recount on.

There use to be a thread focused around useful mods that don't get used as much, and that MAY have a place here in regards to healer-UI discussion. It is a little more focused around a specific theme then overall UI based theorycrafting like this thread is intended for.

My one dissecting comment of Shinwei's interface selection is the size of certain ui-elements. Your target/player bars seem to earn quite a bit of attention from you, being the largest parts of your interface. This seems contrary to someone who is using click-to-heal interfaces like Grid offer.

In addition, I've never played a shaman but it could be said you have an enormous amount of buttons visible that obscure the middle area of play. I'd recommend moving some of those buttons out to mouse-over bars to the sides of your "center sweet spot" or area in which your mouse is likely to hover the most.

Hide-Till-Mouseover is your friend in minimal interfaces (Healer UI's being most deserving of a minimal amount of distractions).

On another note.... I have recount up on my interface as well. It is useful for mid-raid monitoring of out-going healing being done. More for a raid-centric leader than anything however.

I think Shinwei is definately on to something with his UI. He has effectively created a 'center of attention' in the bottom-center part of the screen, where all the info you need is close together. It light not be a 100% minimal approach, but it's definately effective and there is enough screen real-estate left to effectively perform in the encounter with respects to movement and avoiding piles of lethal rubbish etc.

I see people suggest hiding actionbars fairly often, but for me this is not an option. The main reason I keep actionbars around is not for clicking but for watching cooldowns. There are a number of addons available to deliver similar functionality but I find my OmniCC/related sort of addons still provide me with the most effective way of dealing with my shorter cooldowns. That and the bars being visible allows quick emergency clicking if needed, which is especially effective for someone who uses a click-to-cast style of play because they will be moving their mouse around anyhow. The only sort of actionbar button that you can effectively get rid of are things you only need once in a blue moon, or once every (half?) hour, like flasks, elixirs, hearthstones and the likes. For things like this an addon like oPie seems quite effective, which is why I'm currently looking into that.

I'd say there's quite a lot of unnecessary distractions in Shinwei's UI. I can see the duration on his weapon oil at least three times in that one screenshot, which isn't something I'd have constantly displayed even once during combat.

This is a valid point. I do have quite a bit of redundancy with the weapon oil thing. There is one instance on the upper left corner of the screen along with the rest of my buffs. There is one instance of it showing on my Pitbull player frame auras. And finally there is one instance of it on my TotemTimers weapon imbue tracker. To remedy this, I have three options:

1. Use my Satrina Buff Frames to filter out weapon oils.
2. Disable Pitbull player auras.
3. Disable the weapon imbue display on my TotemTimers.

Of these, options 1 and 2 are both things I have thought about in the past and never really come to a conclusion about. They both seem very trivial and do not really offer a substantial advantage, and if I were to log onto one of my other characters who is not a Shaman, I would have no way of monitoring my weapon oil duration since TotemTimers would not be active.

Option 3 I have done before, and then I specced enhancement for a raid and forgot to refresh Windfury Weapon. I am never going to disable the weapon imbue display on my TotemTimers again.

My player unitframe is big. I believe everyone's player unitframe ideally should be big. I have a Prot Warrior alt and his player unitframe is big. It goes without saying that it's very important to monitor your own health when playing a tank. Even if you don't play a tank or a healer class, a very essential skill of raiding is the ability to pop healthstones at the right time to keep yourself alive (you can't just always rely on healers all the time). Personally I don't think I would be able to perform that task if I did not have a big health display for myself.

My target unitframe is the same size just for symmetry purposes.

I don't really understand your statement about how big target/player bars is contrary to using click-to-heal interfaces. Could you please elaborate? I actually don't use any click-to-heal functions. I tried them once, and found that I really do not enjoy holding shift or ctrl down 100% of the time to play.

Only her own buffs show up on her Pitbull frame, something which is more relevant then your 60 minute buffs when you are fighting. Having to look trough Mark of the wild, 3-4 paladin blessings, auras etc. when you want to check if you have your totems on or how much of your Bloodlust/Heroism is left is something I would classify as redundant information.

Speaking of auras, is there some secret gimmick about the Twin fight that makes +20% mount speed favourable?

I have disabled Player Unitframe. Instead I use a HUD which is far more informative and requires less screen estate. Target of Target and that HUD are more than I'll ever need. In general, big is definitely a tendency I'd aim to avoid.

Shinwei,

I really like your new UI. I see you are fighting the Twins. Do your raid frames show you the stack number of the Flame Touched debuff? I can't see it on your screenshot.

I am using xperl and I can't figure out how to display the stacks. It will display the debuff but not the number of stacks. Only way I can do it is to bring out Grid which really lags me out.

I can choose to have my Pitbull display the Flame Touched debuff, I have done so in the past and found that the extra information was too distracting and not very advantageous to my healing, so I disabled it. I can confirm that Pitbull will display the number of stacks of Flame Touched or Dark Touched on the debuff icon should you choose to show them. I don't use X-perl so I'm sorry I cannot help you figure that one out.

I do not use a HUD for the same reasons you chose to use a HUD. I've tried HUDs in the past and found that the information is too compressed and confusing, and as a result turned the middle of my screen into something I did not like. From a healer standpoint it really does not make a lot of sense to use a HUD - the reason being that the health bar of a hud stretches out vertically, away from the raid frames at the bottom. If I am staring at my raid frames, the full length of the HUD's health bar would not be visible without shifting my eye focus slightly away from my raid frames.

As nj00s said, only my own buffs that I apply to myself show on my Pitbull player frame. The Satrina Buff Frames show all buffs from all sources. I do not see any real play advantage in removing this "redundancy". Minimalism for the sake of minimalism does not result in good function.

Fair enough - though it was in part of your 'and I have a tank as well' comment, which prodded me into commenting, as that's what I largely spend my time doing. I spend precious little time healing on either my Druid or Shaman. I do have the health/mana values at the bottom of the HUD, near where you keep your raid frames. Add in a SCT Warning 'Low Health' and it ought to suffice.

The problem with such a discussion is that each role takes a different UI; DPS, Healer and Tank all have different specific needs. These can even change between Arena and PvE - even though you might have the same job. In the end it means that preferences (such as using a HUD or steering away from it) will ultimately have quite an impact on personal UI design, which is only partially to do with taste.

http://omgphatloots.org/UI/Highlights/Led/Led1a.jpg

Is the UI I used when I still played (healer UI is exactly the same). Personally for me it is the most easy, simple and cleanest healing UI possible.
Raid frames (which are smaller then party frames) I tend to put on the right side of my screen, or in some setups below my Player and Target frames, for the simple reason I find it easier and faster clicking things on the right/mid.

For me the main important thing for a healer UI (more pvp oriented) is that every unit frame is close to each other and close to the middle as that is where the focus of your eyes are the most. When I look at my target I will need to quicly see his Target AND my raid/party frames.

p.s. I dont raid, I never did so I dont use timers for bosses and such.