Hope this thread is OK. Some people make just beautiful UIs, my question is how much time do you actually spend getting everything to work together? I've been fiddling the past couple days and really haven't gotten anywhere close to what I want. I think it'd be interesting to know how much time Alefica's UI took (see: http://elitistjerks.com/659238-post2886.html )

Which parts were the most difficult? What specific issues did you run into for your class? Shaman Totems has always been a tough thing for me. When I first did my UI I had two side bars with all my totems, then I got some timers, then I got Flexbar to do the popup/change thing so I just had four buttons visible.

Are there things you wanted to do with your UI but couldn't justify the time and/or just couldn't figure it out?

Anyhow, thought it'd be an interesting question. Personally I'd almost be willing to pay someone who was good at it to make my UI the way I want it, it can take a long time to get it right. Made worse by the fact it is an evolving idea.

I treat my UI as a work in progress and spend 3-4 hours on it a month cleaning up mods I no longer use and installing/adjusting new mods. It's a continual effort though because patches nd changing needs will necessitate updates. If you have the basics of UI design understood you can easily make those adjustments as you need them with any UI.

When I start from scratch (once a year, give or take) it generally takes 6-8 hours of config, but I like to run fairly light and skip custom textures/fonts in an effort to have easy maintenance.

If you're having a difficult time putting together a satisfactory UI, it may be helpful to do a mockup on a piece of paper and identify what you want and where you want it. If you know exactly how you want it to look, the set up time decreases dramatically (I used to spend weeks trying to get a look right) and it simply becomes a matter of finding the correct addons and plugging them in.

Knowing what you want is half the battle. Finding the addon that does what you want is the other half. Installation and adjustment is easy comparatively.

My UI is in a constant evolvement. When I figure that I am to remake it, it usually takes between 1 and 6 hours before I am totally happy with the first revision, depending on how much of the previous UI I will keep. This is though the first revision, so there will be several others before it's playable/raidable.

I do a complete refresh of my UI whenever I see another UI that makes me think "oh, that's a neat way of doing things, I prefer it to my current UI", which usually ends up being every few months or so. When I do that, it'll take me probably 4-6 hours to get everything properly set up on all of my characters (8 different classes, each with something specific like DoT Timers, Totem Timers, PallyPower, Stances/Forms, etc).

As others have stated it's always a work in progress and my UI is never done. I use more time on UI than on the actual game I think. If I am to setup a new UI from scratch I think it takes about 8+ hours, but after that comes all the tweaking. There's a lot of experimental stuff going on in my UI and half of them works and half of them doesn't, so I end up doing a lot of reverse stuff. My motivation (and my curse) is that my UI can never get good enough and therefor I'm always on the lookout for the latest new feature, which takes alot of time.
I envy those who can just setup a UI and then just leave it and be happy, I know I can't.

I feel the same way about my UI. When new mods/encounters change the way I play a little bit, I change my UI. And to answer your question...to be satisfied it usually takes me about 3 hours until I'm completely happy...assuming I'm not use brand new mods.

When I played I would probably spend about 10+ hours a week just fooling around with different setups. I tend to break things up into discrete events in my head, so my UI wasn't really an "ongoing" process per se, though I guess one could say it functionally was.

I think the longest time I spent developing a particular UI was Semiotics, which probably took me about 5ish hours of actually working with mods. But that's kind of deceiving, because there was a whole bunch that had gone into it beforehand.

I knew I was finished with wow when I had more fun working on my UI than playing the game.

I usually spend 4-6 hours in game on mine. I try not to look at other people's UI screenshots too much, because it makes me want to go redo my UI. I already spend enough time ditzing around in-game ><

When I do get sick of my interface I try to find as many different UI screenshots as possible, figure out what mods I think look pretty, then spend anywhere from 1-2 days getting ready to redo my interface.

It depends. Usually, if a new mod comes out that completely changes the landscape (Like Pitbull, or Dock, Autobar, etc), then I spend anywhere between a half hour, and 4-10 hours on it. My newest UI, when I first got it into its current version, took about 5 hours to get the initial idea down, another 5 to get all the 'extra' mods in a satisfactory place, and then an hour or two to perfect it.

Sometimes if i'm not subscribed I'd go on a private server just to mess with my UI.

I spend a lot more time on my UI than i should, honestly. I just love tinkering around with it and seeing what i could do. Now if i was more versed in lua...

Hours and Hours and Hours and Hours.

And when its "finished" I start all over again.

I'm happy someone noticed mine .

My druid's took the longest out of every one of my other characters (yeah, they all have their own UI heh). The thing that really takes the longest is the eePanels. making each custom panel and such is a huge pain, but I like how it looks in the end so I think its worth the time! But to answer the original question, It really depends on what I'm doing. A complete UI overhaul usually takes between 1-3 hours, depending on whether i have all the mods, or I have/want to look for others to suit the new UI's needs. But little changes here and there can take between 5-20 minutes (funny how little changes can often turn into complete redoes though haha).

My ui's are very fluid. They always change. Right now my druid's is evolving more to incorporate Grid, Recount, and Omen. Hopefully I can get something that doesn't look extremely cramped.

edit: In addition to how long it takes, I think another interesting question would be this: What do you guys think is the biggest "limiting" (for lack of a better word) factor that hinders UI creating? For me, Its the buffs and debuffs on my target. They really decide where my unit frames are placed, which also helps in deciding where to place my action bars and stuff like that.

Since my UI's all tend to be very very minimalist they usually don't take a very long time. I don't really need to worry about things like eepanels which tend to take awhile to set up because I usually cut them out of my UI's. My latest UI probably took 4-5 hours combined through all of it's different reincarnations. Most of the time spent on my UI is trying out different kind of layouts and deciding whether I like them or not.

Too long tbh, i generally get bored with my ui once a month, delete every addon and start again. I think my current UI has taken about 5 hours work and thats only the basic layout and keybinding setup done, doesn't look 'pretty' yet.

I personally spend a very large amount of time on my UIs. Im constantly searching for new addons new setups on forums, its a true work in progress. I also like creating custom panels and art work, which adds a large amount of time spent in photoshop. Sometimes I think I enjoy UI design more than I acctually enjoy WoW. XD

As many, I spent a lot of time imagining the setup, selecting the mods, and finally... picking up a premade UI and tuning it bit per bit until I can say " it's my own now".
When it's done, I clean all up, save the files and start up again from scratch.

One day... I spent 6 hours just to make a DAB menu with as many options and bars as I want... But, Discord was so heavy for my machine that I break the setup and returned to the basic UI... But not for long.

Atm, I'm spending 1 hours a day looking for UI templates and screenshots to tweak my own.



Tweaking an UI takes a lot of time to be sure. But, as raiding can be in WoW, I enjoy it

Like someone else said, I really try to not look at other's UI's. When I do, I spend hours just looking at others screenshots, writing down mods they use, and then hours upon hours trying to mimic it. If I had to guess, I probably spend ~20 hours a month on my UI.

It's so bad. Hi, I'm Ohi, and I'm a UI Addict.

At the moment, I'm spending 1 or 2 hours a day just to finish my actual template and produce a stable v1. I'm raiding to stress-test it, questing to tweak appearance... And I've juste copied my entire WoW folder just to have a test platform for my new ideas...

Hi, I'm Finduluin and I'm an UI addict.

Don't worry, you're not alone!

I spend about 3 hours per character to create the main structure. And then a bit of tweaking a day, and another, and... hum, UI addict, you see... :P

Of course in these 3 hours, I don't count the time spent discovering new addons (recently, I've found Healbot and daHud, so I had to make a new interface for my priestess ^^), nor the time spent creating art for my eepanels (I can't count exactly as it's only the third UI I make with eePanels)

I'm Hsyane and I'm a UI addict

I try and spend as little time as possible on my UI's. I usually find myself working with an old UI (chimaines UI's to be precise) and tweaking it to my liking. I will usually edit color codes, alpha, placement, textures, fonts, etc. out-of-game. I usually stick with a UI for about two months, and when my prepaid game card time is up, I'll look for something new, which saves a lot of wassted play time.

I redo my UI usually about once every content patch. 5-6 hours to completely wipe the old UI, get a new set of mods, and configure it all to taste. I've come up with a lot of habits and preferences about what I like in a UI design, so I don't have to do much planning besides figuring out what new functionality I want out of a redesigned UI, and where I will place any on-screen indications of said new functionality.

It used to take longer to configure, but in my last couple incarnations I've dropped eePanels. It's just too long to configure for purely cosmetic improvements. I figured that I don't really need a pretty background behind my actionbars, they're already sectioned neatly into a particular spot between my minimap and hitsmode.

Same for me, I usually spend 2-4 hours a week with my UI, because I love to tinker and adjust it. I am coder, so I love to make UIs and write some DogTags or rewrite some LUA-code anyway.

Annotation: Again, apologies for my bad english, I'm german, if you find mistakes I'd be pleased to recieve PMs =)
(I wonder why I'm not abled to set this as a signature, I can't find the option in the User CP)