Yes. I went and did it again. I changed my UI up drastically. Lately it is as though I love my UI for a while, and then suddenly one element ticks me off and it all changes. I’m starting to really miss the days when I only used one or two small mods to the default UI, but I’m after such a minimalistic approach that I just cannot go back to the default look anymore. Sad… isn’t it? And the best part, I’m wanting to change it again…

Anyway, I thought this might be a good time to give some screenshots of my UI’s evolution, so here we go in order of oldest to most recent starting with the first UI I put together that was not based on the stock UI (and a follow-up post will provide information on what I decide to do with my UI currently):

From July 2008

This layout served me quite well for a long time. My primary frustrations were with the haphazard placement of unit frames and the irritation from having buttons stretch all the way across the bottom of the window. This particular setup actually evolved some (while retaining the ugly factor), as shown here:

From September 2008

This one actually started to look better. Breaking myself from the long-time exposure to having the unit frames in the top left section of the screen started to really open my ideas on how to evolve my UI from this point.

From October 2008

From April 2009

And this is where I finally realized I needed to weed out a lot of the duplicated information I had taking up screen real estate. This is also where I started the drive to be even more minimalistic and actually be able to see the game’s graphics instead of just the information I needed to see per encounter.

From June and July 2009

The July revision is actually quite nice. Honestly, I could have left it alone and been fairly happy. I wanted to try to open up a little more screen space though, and decided to move a few things around. The result is the UI I am currently using (and am about to change):

Where will I take it from here? Absolutely no idea. I think I may play with state changes more to utilize fewer action bars, or perhaps just relocate the one to the right to not be obscured when I open my bags (for some reason I cannot use any bag addon, they simply irritate me and I have no idea why). Maybe I’ll completely revise it yet again and try to make the elements flow together better. Regardless, I’ll have another post coming in the next few weeks that shows the next iteration of my UI.

By now I’m sure the question of why my UI changes so much has crossed your minds. Well, it has a lot to do with the classes/roles I fill. I’ll end up with a UI setup I absolutely love for healing, but then it doesn’t work well for me tanking. Or I’ll love the minimalistic number of buttons I have on my Druid, only to find I’m short buttons on my Priest or Paladin. My goal is to have one UI setup that works across all of my characters, not to create individual interfaces per character. We’ll see if I get it right this time!