Commentary on wow default UI and custom UI design.

Default WoW UI, (src: wow forums)

It’s been a while since i’ve been asked about UI’s and the like but recently a guild mate of mine asked for a UI for his hunter alt. 

In designing my own UI I first had to take apart the default UI and analyze what I thought was wrong with the default UI. Left is an image of the default UI courtesy of Nae <from Accounting> on Baelgun.

The UI has a few problems. Putting aside any aesthetic disagreements we have to take a look functionality. The first problem with the default UI is the way that the information being presented is displayed. The player, party, target and target of target frames are all organized in the upper left while chat is located in the lower left. Additionally abilities are listed along the bottum and right side of the screen.

By themselves the parts of a UI might make sense as an easy way to display information however in a raiding situation watching cool downs while trying to pay attention to a raid addon that deals with timing as well as player/pet/raid frames.

This default UI does not even include any standard raiding frames or omen, a threat addon. With the conventional UI there just is not room for any additional information to be displayed withought the player needing to view 100% of the screen all of the time. This was way too chaotic for me.

I had 3 main problems with it.

1. The elements of the UI I cared about were simply too far apart to view at one time with ease.
2. The UI itself didn’t really compliment its individual parts; even though each part of the UI performed its function, the way it displayed information on the screen it worked against itself.
3. The UI took up far too much screen space.

To fix the problems I reorganized content to make the parts I needed the most, my character frame, target frame, and omen most visible and also aesthetically pleasing. 

Sympa UIv3

Right is a copy of my UI. A quick explanation of the layout. Chat frames are left as they are not needed for immediacy in combat. All combat related information is displayed in a vertical column. Pet abilities followed by my abilities. Pet frame followed by player frame and omen immediately under it. Below omen is my target of target and target. The yellow bar below that is an addon called classtimers which monitors cool downs and debuffs you cast. The only debuffs I care about on a boss are the ones I need to cast so this is really helpful. Right of this column are my buffs and a custom LUA script Inside your grid folder head to the layoutlayout.lua file and use the following code for the same effect.

GridLayout:AddLayout(L["SYMPA"], {
[1] = { groupFilter = "1,2,3,4,5,WARRIOR,DRUID,WARLOCK,MAGE,ROGUE,PRIEST,SHAMAN,PALADIN,HUNTER,DEATHKNIGHT",
maxColumns = "1",
maxUnitsPerColumn = "25",
strictFiltering = true,
groupBy = "CLASS",
groupingOrder = "1,2,3,4,5,WARRIOR,DRUID,WARLOCK,MAGE,ROGUE,PRIEST,SHAMAN,PALADIN,HUNTER" ,
},
})

applied to grid. Grids layout is vertical, only showing groups 1-5 and grouped according to class. A list of addons used can be found here.

EPIC LINKS

• Download Sympa UIv3. Side note about this upload of the UI. Its a slightly older version and does not include class timers or the placement of the pet bar. I take 0 responsibility for assisting people in setting up this UI.
• Elitist Jerks UI thread.
• OMGphatloots.org. Great website filled with information about UI’s as well as discussion about thier functionality.