Post by ignayshus
Had a friend ask me about my philosophy on putting together a UI and I explained it to him with a
picture.
Basically multiple eye lines with important information centered as possible without cluttering up the screen.
Each eyeline should serve a distinctly different purpose, otherwise ditch it, and more than three eyelines is pushing it.
Transparency is your friend, use colors to convey additional information and redundancy is fine as long as it's along a different eyeline.
Thought other's might find this useful, and please feel free to share your own thoughts on the ui as it pertains to healers, because I personally find this stuff interesting.
Post by Paolo
I love the idea of "wireframing" UIs. Nice job with this.
One thing I see people doing that I just don't understand is allocating a tremendous amount of screen space to chat log + combat log. Even though it's on the bottom, it's still making use of a ton of pixels that can be either used intelligently, or left blank. (More empty space is always good for the brain.) I never have the combat log showing, and my chat frame is shrunk to like 4 lines of text with
Chicchai. And kept way off in the bottom right corner where your zone map is shown.
In my healing UI, I actually need Grid to be front & center, not my target/focus frames. So I keep the "basic" frames off to the left...visible when needed, but not in the primary visual zone. And Grid is where your player/target frames are, just below my toon.
Also, I've totally stopped using scrolling text. It doesn't affect my decision-making to see happy numbers. In fact, 99% of the time I pretty much tune out those numbers. One day I just turned it off..and life was good.
I'll post a fresh UI pic later, as the one I have is pretty out of date.
Post by ignayshus
Most things on the UI are not up or are completely transparent when they have no information to display, or have not met the criteria for being displayed.
However if the entire UI was lit up it'd take up 40% of the screen space with 2/3rds of it being at the bottom of the screen, away from what's happening in the environment.
I don't mind cluttering the bottom of the screen with information, because I hardly ever look down there, though I do use transparent logs.
The remaining 13% encompasses the player/focus/target and raid frames, castbars, proc alerts and raid warnings.
This is what it'd look like in action.
