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Among the many accomplishments of World of Warcraft, one of the unsung innovations with the greatest impact was the ability for users (fluent in LUA scripting and XML) to customize the game's interface. The user community embraced this idea, creating thousands of interface mods for every use. Crafting? Gathering? Raiding? Healing? Maps? Whatever your play style, someone's figured out a better interface display to help. Many of these ideas eventually worked their way into the main game interface. Needless to say, Blizzard adamantly supports the online community, in part with an annual BlizzCon panel detailing the process of user interface design.
Last year the topic was programming. But for this year's panel, entitled "The Ancient Secrets of WoW UI Design 2: Electric Boogaloo," the focus was on the art and design. A question and answer period followed the panel, allowing players and mod makers to pick designers' brains on what's in the works.
New UI for Wrath of the Lich King
Overall, Blizzard's design philosophy is based on three big ideas: one, gameplay first; two, games should take a minute to learn but a lifetime to master; and three, polish, polish, polish. That's true of the interfaces as well. UI team lead Tom Thompson outlined his team's goal: "Easy enough for your grandmother to use."
With Thompson's help, senior interface designer Derek Sakamoto looked at a couple of case studies with the upcoming WoW expansion. First up? The achievement system.
Sakamoto learned about the achievement system a year before the game was meant to ship, which means he had to figure out what the designers wanted and how to implement the new interface panel in an attractive way. The process starts with a simple black-and-white wireframe provided by the design team. From there, Sakamoto whipped up some mockups in Photoshop of what the final version might look like. Repeated iterations in Photoshop help the team to pin down exactly what they need before any code is written. The last step is to take the final art and build a finished version. Thompson defined the three steps as "design it, artify it, and program it."
While the wireframe for the achievements panel was straightforward, it went through dozens of revisions during the art phase, and Sakamoto showed many of them to the audience. One version had too much information and looked like a mess. In response to comments that the display looked too dark, Sakamoto created a bright red fiery design that everyone thought was too much. He also experimented with creating prominent faction emblems at the top of the interface, prompting people to comment "it looks too Disney," or "it's too ugly, like your face."
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