This is a guest post by Kyuushi.

There are a bevy of Unit Frame addons available to the UI community, each one with a cadre of supplicants devoted to using their favorite one.  They range from the infinitely tweakable Pitbull to the out-of-the-box awesome XPerl UnitFrames. Each one can and will display every available statistic associated with the unit given the right parameters and selections in the configs.

However, one thing these addons cannot do is create, maintain, and optimize a layout to quickly deliver that information from screen to brain to fingertips! That’s all up to the user and for the poor mensch who just decided to start modifying their unit frames, it’s easily overwhelming and discouraging. I’d be willing to bet that every unit frame addon has lost a user or two to the question, "Where do I put all this?".

Unit frames can be many things, graphical information relay, well designed additions to your overall UI, or an albatross hanging about your neck. When configured well, a unit frame addon can facilitate better game play through better information representation. If you’re spending less time trying to parse out what the unit frames are telling you, you’re spending more time making sure you’re not standing in the fire. WoW has gotten to be a very reactive game, you have to stay on your toes and absorb the information given to you.  Having a good layout for your unit frames can be a major contributor to performance.  

Admittedly, unit frame layout is a bit of a white whale for me.  I fully confess that I have missed a ready check because I was pushing them this way and that, resizing, changing textures and text layouts.   The unfortunate fact is there is no one right answer and no perfect layout; you have to strike balances and compromise.  Do you sacrifice screen real estate to have wider unit frames to increase granularity for finer data representation?  Is it worth an extra 2 inches in width to discern just how much health your target has left

There are two unit frames that, barring strange circumstances, every layout is going to use: 

• Player – This is you and all associated statistics.  Health, Mana/Rage/Energy/Runic Power, buffs, debuffs, even a casting bar depending on the addon.  
• Target – Whether you’re trying to kill it or keep it from getting killed, your target shares much of the same configuration options as your "Player" Unit Frame.  

You can optionally include more depending on your needs: 

• Focus – Your focus is easily set with macros and I see it used a lot for classes who CC or need to maintain a macro’d interrupt on a specific mob.
• Focus Target – As the name implies simply the focus’s target. 
• Target of Target – Knowing who your target is acting upon can be extremely helpful.  Be it tanking, DPSing, or healing, it’s a quick, visual check of the direction of action. 
• Target of Target of Target – This unit frame, aside from being a pain to type, isn’t often used and, in my opinion, can get redundant outside of niche uses.  

Not only do you have to figure out how to best layout up to six frames, you have to wedge these into a UI that already contains such elements as chat windows, minimaps, action buttons and party frames!  When working with Unit Frame Layout, trial and error is generally the best practice.  Tweak your unit frames, place them so as to direct the information you’re interested at easy-to-view locations and go run an instance.  Make notes, re-tweak afterwards.  Much like the adage goes, though, "Imitation is the highest form of praise," and keeping an eye on various sources of UI discussion can be a boon to your UI.  We’ll take a short tour of some screenshots that display various methods used to effectively display information presented through unit frames.  

I’m going to break the following examples into groups based on major characteristics.  The first group is oriented on a horizontal plane.  It’s very common to see unit frame layouts take the order of Player then Target in a left-to-right fashion, as with the default UI.  Placing two frames side by side is no great challenge to anyone, but modifying them to be effective at data representation and include a sense of design does take some practice.  After all, nobody likes to stare at a messy inelegant screen for hours at a time, but not all of us are design and layout gurus. 

The first set of unit frames I’m going to highlight are from the designer "Duke".  Unfortunately, I don’t believe his compilations are available for download anymore, but that won’t stop us from learning from his acute sense of design.

Duke’s decisions here all reflect not only an attempt to limit the redundancy of information, but to present all the pertinent information in a well laid out and easily readable format.  Here, the player frame is on the left with the target frame on the right.  Since he has his personal buffs displayed in the upper right hand corner of his UI, he removed all the buffs and debuffs from the player frame and instead used that room for Focus and Focus_Target frames.  By truncating the cast bar he’s incorporated into his unit frames, he leaves just enough room for the Target of Target frame attached to the upper right Target Frame, leaving the area underneath the Target frame for buffs and debuffs.  The simplicity of the design helps to deliver as much information as you can assimilate at a glance without overwhelming your UI.  

The next in the horizontal groupings is a two-fer from the designer Donk.  The first of which is his basic, no frills layout attached to the bottom of his screen.  Player Frame on the left, Target of Target frame in the middle and Target frame on the right.  If I’m not mistaken, Donk’s priority was tanking and having his Target of Target frame in the middle gives him one of the fastest indications that someone has yanked aggro.  Another highlight of this layout is the sparsity of information.  While you can see the name of his Target and his Target’s Target, there’s no name text cluttering up his Player frame.  That name isn’t going to change and including it would only help to clutter the layout.  

The second layout from Donk includes a couple of trends that I want to point out.  Of primary importance, I want to get away from the idea that unit frames belong at the bottom.  In this layout, Donk has included his Player, Target and Target of Target unit frames on the same horizontal plane as his character. 

When you think about it, the majority of your time is eyes are going to be travelling along the lines of the "Rule of Thirds" – basically, within an tic-tac-toe board on your screen.  Are you standing in fire?  Are you too close to the tank and going to get him frost blasted on KT?

All these things are answered by looking at your toon and by including his unit frames closer to his character, Donk can easily assess the situation based both on numerical information and situational detail. 

Another point made with this layout is that uniformity is not a requirement. Donk’s player frame is a good deal larger than the target frame and the target frame is vertically offset from the player frame.  When it comes to modifying your UI, you can play fast a loose with a lot of rules, but it still comes down to what works for you.  

The next layout pushes the boundaries of unit frames almost to an extreme.  Metz’s UI uses oUF to completely revamp the common squared design used by almost everyone.  Instead of large blocks of graphical data, he’s swapped them for a circular design.  His player frame is on the left, displayed under his character name, with his warlock pet’s unit frame offset and scaled to be slightly lower.  Inside the frames you can see health percentages and energy totals.  As the player’s health is depleted the colored banding on the Player Frame converts to a more urgent color and location. 

The outer ring also works as an aggro indicator, again increasing from green to red as threat grows.  To the right of his character he’s placed his target frame with the target’s target offset above and to the left.  Interestingly, he didn’t choose to place the Target’s Target frame in a position to preserve vertical symmetry with his Player and Pet frames. 

To that effect, every time I look at the full screenshot, the first thing my eye notices is the Target’s Target frame.  Included with the Target Frame are the target’s buffs and debuffs with a circular skin which match the overall design of the layout.  Information is presented in a manner that is non-standard for most wow players.  In fact, it almost looks like a first person shooter’s HUD.  Overall it’s an impressive display of counter-culture design and perfectly illustrates the point that anything goes as long as it works for the player.

The next group of Unit Frame Layouts use a vertical orientation.  While horizontal orientations can lend themselves to dramatic placements, you’ll often see the vertical orientations anchored to the near bottom of the screen.  Another common trend in these is the use of wider unitframes.  A wider unit frame gives a greater degree of granularity and, from a design view, preserves symmetry.  Many of the vertical orientations place their unit frames so as to grow upwards.  This lets the designer incorporate the player frame into the UI as a sort of anchor and and give them freedom to structure the additional frames in a manner that that doesn’t detract from the overall layout. 

We’re going to take a look at another Duke layout, this one, while less dramatic than his transparent UI, incorporates the frames just as effectively and with the same eye towards design and effective transmission of information.  With the player frame attached to the bottom of the stack of action bars each additional frame then becomes additive in nature.  If the player doesn’t have a target, the UI doesn’t look incomplete.  With the Target’s Target, Target of Target of Target, Focus and Focus Target frames set to the right and left of the  action bar block there is a clear declination of information present when things get hairy in the game.  His usage of character portraits within the Target’s Target and the Focus frames are for aesthetics only, continuing the same block-height theme of the action bar block. 

While you do gain greater granularity with wider unit frames, you do limit yourself in the aspect of placement and maintaining the ability to convey information quickly.  The last layout we’re going to look at comes from Ankler at mmo-champion.org forums.  His unit frames layout, much like Duke’s attaches both the target and the player’s frame to a block of action bars. 

The Target and Target’s Target frames are partially separated and given their own containing frame, as such, when no target is selected, the entire top portion disappears.  With this layout, Ankler has a wealth of information all in a compact form of graphical data.  Less time looking for the specific frame translates to more time on your character or more time enjoying the great graphics this game can provide. 

A benefit to layouts that use wider frames comes in the form of more real estate for buffs and debuffs.  With the smaller frames used in most horizontal orientations, buffs can scale upwards or outwards and can quickly move out of control.  While most addons can filter for class specific buff/debuff lists, having too little space for the buffs and debuffs associated with your target can leave you squinting to differentiate icons while the action passes you buy or more aptly steams right over! 

Hopefully, with a couple examples knocking around the creative centers of your brain, you’ve started to look at your unit frames and will spend a little time nudging them this way and that until you’ve found the perfect layout for you.  Once you have, I think you’ll realize that effective data representation is one of the keys to maximizing your game play. 

I can’t stress enough that the "correct layout" is a specifically personal preference. Personally, I can’t look at my wife’s UI without offering to "fix that up" for her, and every time I’m shut down! Her setup, while mysterious and frightening to me, works exceedingly well for her and it’s certainly falls into the category of not being allowed to fix what isn’t broken. 

A lot of these principles translate well into other facets of your UI design as well, but come with the same caveat of compromise.  Keep an eye on resources such as NoStockUI and MMO-Champion’s Show Your UI thread for inspiration and give in to your urges to experiment with your unit frames!