Salovia has basically been idling along in WoW lately. I hop on every day to cycle auctions and run HTOC for Neiran, but that’s about it. I mainly play to raid since we’re at the top of our game (though we’re far from end game). So what’s a bored tank to do? I have a bajillion badges and don’t need any more tank or holy pieces so there’s no need to grind badges. I got my red proto drake a while ago, so I’m not really gunning for heroics like I used to be. Well, what else could I do?

Ah yes, I think I’ll tweak my UI and post it on the website; it’s about as interesting to everyone else as what I had for breakfast this morning. “Everyone else cares,” I tell myself.

Alright, so these types of things are usually for me, but I hope you find them interesting. I do these overhauls every few months, but I think that I’m finally starting to settle on a layout that I like and can use. Let’s start with the before, click for bigger:

Not a whole that is interesting, honestly. I try to have the ‘game world’ as clutter free as possible; you can see DXE, buffs, my bar, target bar, stance bar and pally power. I use SunnArt to squish the game viewport down so that I get that lower area. I do this because that is all basically noise and I want as little noise covering the gaming area as possible. So now I’ve got to figure out what I can do to improve it.

I realized that I have a ton of icons on the screen that I don’t use. I have a lot of colorful information staring back at me. I have too many lines. It’s all functional and informative, but I really don’t need all of that information at once. I can definitely slim this down. The icons? They’re all bound - I click nothing except Grid for heals and other offensive-defense (blessing of protection, etc.). My clicking is for targeting runaways or accidental pulls, not doing the actual taunts or anything else.

Utopia? Helpful, but total excess. Gone. Replaced with simple brain power.

Recount? Helpful, but do I need colored bars? No. Do I need total damage, dps AND percents? Nope. As a tank, I actually use Recount a lot - it’s helpful for deaths, seeing heals done and dps performance (’yes battle rez the top heals/dps if they go down’ type thing). I definitely don’t need bars to tell me class colors which I don’t even know what they are anyway. What the hell color is ‘hunter’? ‘rogue’? Please, they’re the same damn thing to me (colorblind).

Omen? I regret that Omen is still useful. It’s helpful to know who’s up top so I can throw salv on them, call for FD, ask for MDs/tricks, and who to keep an eye on in case someone is about to pull. It’s the same deal as Recount though - I definitely don’t need colored bars and a bajillion digits staring me in the face.

Pally Power? Gah, I can’t get rid of this one yet either. I’d like it to fade up when I mouse on it, but it doesn’t offer that. I like it up so that if anyone gets battle rez’d, I can throw 10-minute buffs on them very quickly. I don’t even have to think about what class they are or anything.

Chat? I know, I know, fade it out, it’ll blend with the background, you’ll regain some screen real estate. The problem is that with my eyes and horrible color vision, anything that puts text on game textures is torture to try to read to me. the chat background has to stay. And yes, I want to see my chat windows during raiding.

Buffs? Buffs are not actually necessary. Once a fight starts, there’s not much that I need to know from buffs. Penance on me? Guardian Spirit? Renew? Flash of Light hot? Don’t really care honestly. It’s all noise and I don’t know buff icons well enough to be able to quickly glance at them and see what I need. I used to have buffs down by my name bar, but I found that they were just overloading my brain when I was mid-fight. I need them, but not all the time, so they are relegated to where they were born.

Minimap? It’s basically a circle that holds some addon buttons that I randomly use, and the calendar. You’re gone.

Grid? Stays. Period.

DXE? Dues voX Encounters is a new addon for me. I’ve railed against DBM and the like because people come to rely on them and they can muck things up. I liked just learning the encounter as well. DXE is like DBM, but a bit different. Much more refined. I feel like it’s informative without being hand-holdy. Get it, you’ll like it. Stays.

Unit frames? As a tank, I need myself and my target, and my target’s target. Stays.

Good grief Charley Brown! That’s a bunch of crap (but not nearly as much as others…), how can I make sense of it all? Thankfully, Mizzy is a kick ass designer, so she helped me tackle the issue… using this:

Paper Wireframing! We drew out the proportions of the monitor, and I free-styled all of the important elements. They’re obviously not to scale, but that’s not too important at this stage. It’s mainly for moving everything around quickly and getting a bird’s eye view of what the UI will do and how it will function. At first it seemed odd - why not just do it digitally, you can move stuff around just as easy. Well, you can and you can’t. It’s easier to move around, but it’s not easier to quickly get a feel for the layout. With the paper frames, I don’t commit to anything, I can try anything very quickly. It also makes me think more about the size and orientation of all the elements on my screen.

After an afternoon of toil, I landed on the layout I wanted and started kicking my addons into shape. This is with what I ended up:

MUCH cleaner. I’m not in a raid, so there’s more there than you can see: DXE is still in the top left corner, just hidden. Pally Power is present, but not while solo. Omen is also hiding out of combat. I’ve removed something like 24 icons and made all my tanking abilities very large and faded. I can easily see their cooldowns. Chat window moved, but is largely unchanged. Unit frames are untouched. Minimap moved down and slimmed. Overall, I’ve really stripped out a lot of info that was largely not useful. I’ve even made the game world bigger and tightened up the black area down below.

I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I raided Vezax and Yogg with this setup and it’s working out really, really well. I’d LOVE to see some breakdowns like this of other UIs. Anyone care to throw up their UI and explain it?

Tags: UI

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 11:22 pm and is filed under UI, addons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.