Originally Posted by
shanthi
There's a perfectly valid design principle for using Decursive, as a healer. (My history: I used to use Decursive when healing, I don't currently.) It's a question of balancing breadth and depth. In web design/UI design, newer designers often make the mistake of trying to, say, put all fuctionality into a single menu. But just because it's possible to do it doesn't make it the right call, because there's a usability cost to making things (like a menu) "too deep." It can be better to have two menus, increasing breadth but decreasing depth, to make it faster/easier to find something (assuming you do a good job of signaling to the user which menu is their best bet).
Similarly, there is a usability cost to making your raid frames "too deep" in terms of all the click/mouseover functions you want them to perform. Using click-healing as an example, if you've already bound right-click, left-click, middle-click, control-left, control-right, control-middle, shift-left, shift-right, shift-middle, alt-left, alt-right and alt-middle to heals/cooldowns (and the easy-to-reach keys on your keyboard to utility spells), there's a very good argument that using double modifiers either for dispels or for certain other utility/cooldowns is not optimal, cognitively. Instead, having a second (very small) set of "frames" (if you want to call Decursive that) that simply dispels with a right or left click adds a little extra breadth (of screen real estate) but arguably significantly reduces the cognitive load of the added depth that would come from putting them on your raid frames with further click-bindings or mouseover macros.
This was especially true for a priest (which is what I play) in the past, where there were two dispels, one for magic and one for disease. That's a thing of the past (and priest toolkits--especially for discipline--have been pared down dramatically in Warlords of Draenor), which is why I no longer bother with Decursive. But the principle is still valid. Obviously, you can also take that to extremes, in WoW UI or outside UI (one single-item menu for every website function or one set of WoW UI elements for every heal, for example, would be silly) or simply waste too much space on breadth for what you're gaining. Each person simply has to balance that for themselves.