PitBull + Bartender3 w/ cyCircled_Vol

Thanks. I did, but it got ignored.

Ok, I have to get in on this. I've been reading this thread for awhile, and love the 'theory' behind a UI that enhances your game as opposed to just looking cooler than the stock UI.

This is the oldest screenshot I have handy of what I started with.
http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p...terfacenew.jpg

I was working to centralize my frame and my target frame, as well as cleaning up my bars. This was when I first hid my keybound spells to clean up clutter.

What I'm working toward now is this.
http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p...rfacenew-1.jpg

I built this in photoshop by cutting out what I deem as 'needed' components and re-arranging them. A couple things of note, based on discussions here...

Three of my 4 corners are wasted. SWStats, Raid frames, and my non-combat click spells (tailoring, vent spam macro, etc.) eat three of the 4 corners. My reasoning is due to my natural mouse hover area. My mouse tends to sit on my target frame, so thats where my important twitch-clicks are: where the mouse is. The buttons in the bottom right frame are other buttons that MAY need to be used, but not often. Stuff like soulfire, my mount buttons and whatnot live here, in the corner for quick mouse movement. Standard chat frames, minimap, blah blah blah.

What I'm currently focusing on is that blob of green in the center. I've played with this setup a bit, and been amazed by how much easier it is to focus on what I'm doing in combat. Quartz, DoTimer, and CoolDown are all right on top of my character, and monitered without a need to really look at anything else. My DBM and Debuffs are in a 'pop-up- type position, making them very apparent even when focusing on /stopcasting. I'm also using Prat and clearfont to clean things up (thanks to this thread!).

What kills me the most is my raid frames. I am still using the blizzard default, mostly because I can't get the information I need from Grid (yet). I sometimes raid lead, and I always am helping monitor whats going on. I need to be able to see raid wide health and mana, but havn't found a way to display mana in Grid. Maybe you guys can help me out with that.

I really thing the centralized frames are hugely useful as a DPS class. All the information I need to know is dead center. In all reality, for a raid I could remove everything but the center blob and operate at 100%, which I think is a good benchmark for judging my UI. I'll get a screenshot of what I'm using right now up tomorrow, and hopefully have a couple new things to tweak.

Kiralyn: Perfect Raid may be for you then. You should check it out. [WoWInterface Downloads : PerfectRaid]

Same reason here basically, though I also do some fairly frequent fiddling with certain action buttons and what is on them. For example my 2 key is my 'Spammable Judgement' key for when I'm healing, but which Judgement I'm using depends on a few things, and I have a separate macro for each Judgement I might want to do, so that one ends up being switched around quite frequently.

My Alt-1 and Ctrl-1 buttons are also generally bound to situational things which I swap around frequently depending on what I'm doing (Ranging from some spammable "Hold your fire!" or "AoE!" Raid Warning macros to simply having Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent on them).

It's also for me the case (As I've pointed out earlier in this thread), that I'm far more a person to pay attention to what happens on the corners and the left and right edge of my screen, as well as the top of my screen (Approximately in that order as well). Most people say they find having their important information in the lower center of the screen works for them (And screenshots indicate this as well: The vast majority has their unit frames located there) but I personally have a bit of a 'blind spot' in this location, so I put information on there which is useful to occasionally glance at, but not anything I need to know all the time.

Point being, applying any kind of universal idea to what should and shouldn't be done when designing an UI is folly. It's more personal preference than anything else. Personally I prefer occupying the edges with information as much as possible and keeping the center clean, other people find they don't pick up the information they need to know this way. In the end, we all differ and design something that works for us. There's a lot of factors in play there, from monitor size to text size and font you feel comfortable reading at different speeds to whether you find nice looking backgrounds distracting or comforting.

The thing is, from an interaction standpoint, it isn't easier for clickers. Easier would mean having buttons nagged at the edge of the screen, with "dead zones" between them to account for accuracy-loss of certain pointing devices. Also a consistent positioning, where buttons never move, which make them reflex-response programmable in the mouse movement.

Having multiple buttons cluttered up in the same place isn't really helpful. Take a hint from a wordprocessor, fex. Pull out all the buttons from the hot-bars into the middle and align them up into a square, then try to learn it with the argument that it is "easier" that way.

I move my eyes across the screen at all times, most of everyone does. I move my mouse too, but I move it more in the X direction than in the Y direction. (X direction precision is actually higher on fex. mouse-pads and other similar pointers than Y-direction precision is)

I like what you have so far, however, do you really find yourself able to click the buttons on the lower-right hand corner with precision, or do you sometimes find yourself missing and hitting the wrong ability?

My other pet peeve here, is that you probably should move Omen down and align it so it's in a less distracting edgecase of the screen. It's passive information, not active, and as such should only be viewed as that.

Hmm. Do you really access SW Stats mid-combat? I've found that in reality, I'm not. Others are different, but okay. ( Information overload, aka "Moving things on the screen" is something you might want to avoid if you want your attention to get drawn to fex. the raid frames when things go wrong there.)



Aye, having Target/Castbars and such in a frontal position helps a lot, same with castbars. What I find hard is where to put "focus" targets for arenas and such.

I'm a big fan of sRaidFrames, You can configure it to basically do the same that you have now, along with highlighting of certain debuffs, and more importantly, inverse health ratio, highlight of aggro and range fading. Might not be helpful for you as a warlock, but very helpful for a healer

Looking forwards to it. Do you ever find yourself having issues separating the various interface elements in the middle of your screen in the case of hectic combat?

Having played both a priest and a rogue, I had pretty much the same problem until I discovered HealBot. Now all I need to do when switching roles is to log out, turn on healbot (and smartbuff) and I'm fine. Not cluttered UI either, since you can adjust the alpha of the healbot display to your liking. I recently even removed all my healing spells from my actionbar.

Will post a screenie of my UI later (currently at work, shh, don't tell)

Ok, here we go:

The first picture is my UI playing my rogue in a raid (Nightbane)




And this is my shammy, it's kinda hard to see healbot since I'm the only one in the "party", it's on the left side next to the bar on top of the chatframe. I also wanted to show the bag addon I use, it's called ENGBagsand it groups/sorts everything in your inventory (zomg ) The bar on the right edge of the screen fades out, as well as the minimenu or whatever it's called (faded out in the screenshot).



I'm pretty happy with this setup, and so far I haven't found a way to minimize my UI even further.

He's having a go at me for having no action buttons on my screen what so ever though

/palmface.
Note to self: Read/understand the #$%#$% OP.

EDIT: Ugh, was going to post something useful, and still was unable to come up with anything relevant to the OP. I blame 6 hours of sleep in the past 36. /apologies.

Kira, love the look you're going for on the UI. I've followed all the various UI threads here, and I love the clean UIs, but it seems especially hard to achieve for warlocks. One thing I didn't see on your mockup was dot timers. If you use them, where do they go? And what goes under combat clicks?

As far as the raid frames, I'm not sure about showing mana, but Grid is great for the few things I need to track in every raid, which is mostly soulstones and imp buff. It's a lot easier, at least for me, to look at Grid to see if my tank has blood pact and to quickly find a rezzer to SS if it's going bad than with any other raid frames I've tried. I use XRaidStatus for raid mana, etc. when I need to see it. You also mentioned your non-combat spells taking up room; have you tried Geist? That let me clean up a lot of extra buttons, but kept quick access to them. I'm thinking about moving all the spells Necrosis manages to that as well. (And before anyone says it, I know, Necrosis is an awful resource hog, but I just can't seem to get rid of it. That's the one holdout from the awfuls UIs I used when I first started playing.)

To Imbar:

Please read AT LEAST the OP before posting.

I'd like to add something about wether its better to show action bars or cooldown bars (+GCD +Rangechecker).

For me the best solution was to have both.
I am alternating between 5 chars currently so my idea was to create an UI that offers the most flexibility for every class and situation (with minimal changes between classes and raid/pvp/solo).

Playing 5 different classes I obviously need to show the action bars since I just can't remember all my bindings for all my chars all the time.

Having to move my eyes back and forth between action bars and the real action was pretty hard on my eyes and I came to use the addon cooldowntimers2 (highly recommended... very flexible and configureable and it can announce SCT style when an ability is ready so theoretically you neither need action nor cooldown bars) to show cooldown bars for short cooldowns at the left of the center of my screen in addition to the action bars.

When I first used cooldown bars I tried to hide my action bars and only show cooldownbars for all cooldowns but eventually found out that its a lot harder and takes longer for my brain to process looking at 10 cooldown bars than just knowing where to look on my action bar for a certain cooldown. Because basically in a specific situation you will want to know wether you can use a specific ability and not necessarily want to know about the cooldown of every ability that isnt currently available.

I liked neither extra eyework nor extra brainwork too much so I worked on a solution that will fix both.

Basically I made 3 zones for bars and each shows categorized info (1 Above my healthbar: Castbar, short important CDs; 1 below: short important buffs i.e. sprint, Shield Wall, Trinkets; 1 above the enemy: Enemycastbar, Dots, Debuffs...). These are all near the center of my UI with the Healthbars. In some situations I want all that info compressed right there because I need to see nonstop whats going on without having to look at my action bars and I need to time my spells to maximize dps or keep certain debuffs up.

Only the essential stuff is up near the center and the odd and long cooldowns are only shown on my action bar: the 30 minute cooldown of shieldwall and some other occasional skills would only clutter my UI center because they are not vital or can typically be checked before the action is getting hot.

So my solution to this problem is having the nonessential cooldowns only on my action bars in the periphery (obviouly you could just show the nonessential cooldowns as bars as well and put them in the periphery but I need the action bars as stated above anyways) and the essential ones only shown as cooldown bars in the center. Tested this with warlock, mage, rogue, warrior, shaman and druid and found this to work well for all of them.

With a combination of just cooldowntimers2 and action bars you can have 3 great ways of showing your cooldowns and I would personally recommend using all 3, figuring out for yourself which cooldown you want to show in which way because i found neither of these 3 optimal for every situation but a combination seems very strong to me.

I knew I had it somewhere, just took ages to dig it out (actually had some help from the official wow forums^^)

This has to be one of the best UI's I've ever seen (and no, I didn't make it):




All credit goes to Dolly

PS.: If anyone's interested I can probably also dig out the thread where she posted it along with the link to her addon folder... heck, I'll probably do it just to have it myself^^

Question: why, specifically, is this UI so good? I guess the layout is interesting, but it's a bit lacking in information.

Also, as stated several times in this thread, this is not the Post Your UI topic. Maybe talk about what elements of this UI appeal to you and why, instead of linking an image and saying "this is good."

The only issue I have with most viewport UIs is that they chop off two sections of my screen, and normally the only space that I want occupied by "permanent" UI fixtures (the ones always on my screen, not castbars or timers) is the bottom section, since that's where my attention is 90% of the time.

I used to use Skinner for that purpose, but the bottombar isn't a true viewport and doesn't resize the 3D frame. I don't know if there's a mod that can do the same thing as a viewport except only on the bottom (and this isn't the What's That Mod?! thread either), but what I eventually found out is that I don't really like the entire bottom half of my screen cut off either. Instead I tend to keep most of my permanent UI fixtures in the bottom center, leaving some space on either side.

Sure, why not.

I like it so much because

- it's not cluttered - at all
- it also looks very sleek and streamlined, someone obviously put some thought into it
- there's not too much information, a lot of screen space free of addons, making it easier to immerse yourself in the fantasy world
- it's minimalistic - which I thought is the direction this thread is taking...
- everything seems to fit together, it doesn't look like loads of different addons with different looks

Also, assuming this is the "out-of-combat"-version, what other information would you add?

This is my problem with "minimalistic" UIs. Sure, they're pretty, but to what end do you sacrifice information for looks?
I shudder to see the minimalist UIs that lack Damage Meters, Threat Meters, Raid health bars, etc. If your tanks/healers die or you pull aggro, it's time to enable those mods.
Perhaps the 'perfect' UI would have Addons that turn on when needed. Most addons have this built in, e.g. KTM pops up when you join a party, group frames layouts vs raid frames layouts (AG_UF namely, at least that's what I'm familiar with). If you are soloing, flying around on your epic birdy, minimalism is great (as BlackCadian is saying above), but to "What other information would you add?", that is my reply.

I think there is a fine line between form and function. There is also a major difference between a healer UI and a DPS UI. I have never seen a good "minimal" healer UI, there is just too much stuff a healer needs to see to make one that is both functional, but minimal. DPS on the other hand, can usually limit the amount of action buttons they need through keybindings and what not, and the lack of healer addons.

Here is my current Work in Progress:


It has Omen, it has SWStats, it has Raid Frames, it has a rather large minimap, it has Target of Target and Pet frames, however is is pretty aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion) and isn't very cluttered at all. I think it really comes down to the UI designer and how well they can include everything.

Don't see a necessity to post all these UIs. If I wanted to browse through generic UIs without interesting features I'd go for the corresponding "post your UI" thread.

Apart from that I would like to know more about this major difference between a healer and a DPS UI because basically to me adding a well configurated Grid on top of my DPS UI with a few mouseover casting macros seems to do the trick just fine but my raiding experience as healer is limited.

Agreed, I add Grid and Healbot and that's it.
I really can't think of anything else you would need off the top of my head, and I don't see any immediate reason why a healer UI couldn't be easily minimalistic.

One thing I see over and over is all this work into great UIs, but people still have their tooltip in the bottom right corner. This boggles my mind so much. Using Tinytip you can show ToT right there in the tooltip. I use this option soo much, I cannot see having my tooltip in the bottom right. Kinda contradicts the whole centralization of information trend here.

Also Ryas, awesome UI, I would personally move Omen up a little to be even with the blue bar above your unitframes like swstats is,

Well, just a centralised Grid with aggro indicators, hot timers, etc clearly visible is a fair bit of clutter in and of itself...

However, I think the reason most healer UIs are maximalist is because there's an incentive for healers to go for a UI with plenty of bars, buttons and so on simply because that sort of indicator is more readable at a glance than the actual rendered game world. Subtleties of mob status and the like that a dps class focusing on the rendered area easily picks up can be completely lost to a healer who by nature is focusing on raid health with occasional glances at the game world rather than the other way around. For that reason a healer UI will tend to use much larger and and more centralised (i.e. obstructive) indicators for aggro gain, boss ability timers, ToT(oT) health and name, proximity warnings, non-target buff & debuff indicators, mob emotes and so on: everything a dps'er could easily pick up by studying the rendered area while the healer is watching the raid frames.

I guess, in conclusion, it's certainly possible to design a minimalist healer UI. If you did I think most healers in 25-mans would be less effective if they tried playing with it, even if they prefer a minimalist paradigm for dps or tanking UIs. 'course, I could just be projecting here :p

That is beautiful! Ryas you do awesome work.

No...I'm having "go" at you because you belittle the way many people play and then attempt to justify it with an incoherent theory about UI design.