inglorious

This week WoW.com podcast the #99 WoW Insider they received an email from user Chimitick that prompted a discussion surrounding the World of Warcraft UI. Host Mike Schramm has a lot of positive things to say about WoW’s UI, whereas WoW.com’s Mark Turpin (aka Turpster) is a little more critical. Discussion centers around Blizzard making WoW more accessible to vision impaired users, to Blizzard “stealing” popular ideas from the UI mod community, and even discussion on Turpsters own “Turpster’s Vision.”

Scharmm can be quoted at one point saying:

“One thing you can point to to say it is an excellent UI is that other games have used the same time of thing.”

I would encourage UI designers to avoid this type of thinking. Just because an idea is popular doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good. A lot of things can be done to improve upon the Blizzard’s UI. In the next few weeks I’ll be introducing a segment on Inglorious I am going to called “Solving the Hotbar” where I’ll discuss improvements that can be made to make gameplay easier and more fun.

If MMO UI is your thing you may want to give the podcast a listen. You can check it out by:

[iTunes] Subscribe to the WoW Insider Show directly in iTunes.
[RSS] Add the WoW Insider Show to your RSS aggregator.
[MP3] Download the MP3 directly.