Two of Blizzard’s User Interface developers sat down to tell us a bit about the development of WoW’s interface, and to talk a little about some of the recent changes, such as the latency bar and Death Knight character portrait.
The most important thing Blizzard keep in mind when designing WoW’s UI is to keep it simple. Many of WoW’s modified UIs, designed by players, are complicated and take a while to learn. Blizzard try to keep the UI straight forward so new players can also understand how to operate the controls.
The UI team were told they were to design the achievements panel last October, and it took 9 months for it to reach its current look. They showed all the different variations of design they tried, before deciding on settling for what we have now, as seen in patch 3.0.2.
The Death Knight character portrait was the first topic the panel discussed. As we all saw at BlizzCon last year, the original design was a blade, with the runes and runic power incorporated. Through the different builds of Wrath of the Lich King, we saw this design change, and the most recent version is just a standard character portrait, with the runes lined up underneath the runic power bar. The RP bar is in the place of the mana/rage/energy bar.
