Healer Boredom: A UI issue?

TL;DR: Healer boredom is caused by healers looking at health bars instead of watching the raid happen. This causes all of WoW's artwork to become irrelevant to most healers, as they don't have the time to view it while raid healing. Until healers can heal by looking at the people they are healing, they will always be disconnected from the raid and possibly bored.

Human Eye Movement
In order to understand my point of view on this subject, it's important to understand how human eye movement works.
You can find a pretty good article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye#Eye_movement

The points I wish to highlight are two of the movements humans use frequently while looking at a computer screen:
Saccade: A fast eye movement you perform when you wish to look at a different object.
Smooth pursuit: A slower eye movement you perform while "locked on" to a moving object.

In relation to WoW, you are performing smooth pursuit when you watch an npc run across your screen. You are performing a saccade when you look away from the npc and look at your health bar. Unfortunately, during most of a saccade, your brain stops processing images, and so you are effectively blind (over-simplification, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking).

The result is that any time you flick your eyes between your target's character, your health bar or your action bar, you stop seeing for a very short period of time. This means that when you are looking at your character, you don't know how much health you have left. If you wish to find out, you must blind yourself temporarily in order to look at your health bar. Once you are looking at your health bar, you don't know what your target is doing. To find out, you must blind yourself again.

Many UI mods have already done much to alleviate this problem for tanks & dps. Mods that move your player & target unit frames closer to the center of the screen have become quite common, and for good reason: They reduce the amount of time it takes to saccade, and so they reduce the amount of time you spend blind while playing WoW.

The Raid Healer's UI
The most common raid healing UIs I have come across generally boil down to 10-40 little green bars on the left hand side of your screen. Some mods have gone a long way to condensing the information presented there so that you can spend as little time as possible reading your raid's status before acting.

Unfortunately, this does nothing for the problem where if you stop looking at your raid frames and start watching the boss fight, you must blind yourself for the time it takes to start looking at the action, and then while you watch the action you have no idea how much health anyone has. Healers who look away from their raid frames run a greater risk of not noticing someone taking an unexpected burst, healers who never look away do not run this risk. In this, healers who dare to look away from the little green bars in order to watch the actual fight are punished because it causes people to die.

There is little mod makers can do about this given the current UI API. Mod makers can make assumptions about where the player & their target are on the screen: Generally they are both front and center, and so placing player & target frames near the center of the screen is a "safe bet". When it comes to party or raid healing, there is no pattern to where other raid members stand in relation to the healer, and so there is no way for the mod maker to place raid frames in such a way that flicking your eyes between your target and your target's health bar will always take the least amount of time possible.

What needs to change
In order to fully explore how the raid UI affects healer boredom, and how the raid UI can be modified to alleviate it, I think nameplates need to change.

Currently they are unusable by healers during raids for several reasons:

• Limited range: Healing spells have a longer ranges than nameplates.
• Anti-overlap code: Nameplates avoid overlapping by teleporting to a different part of the screen. The nameplate you were about to clickcast heal can teleport away because somebody near your target moved.
• No scaling: Nameplates do not scale based on range: A group of 10 name plates 40 yards will take up an excessive amount of screen real estate.

I suggest leaving friendly & enemy nameplates as they are, and creating a new type of nameplate for group members. I further suggest opening up these new group nameplates to the same range of modding tools that are available for unit frames. Further, add some options in the API to affect how they scale/fade/show/hide based on distance & status. For example a mod could specify that a raid nameplate will only display health bars of injured players, or that debuff icons appear over players.

Does anybody else have any ideas?