THEORETICAL NOTES ON RTS UI
Human brains are divided into two hemispheres, and though they are working together as one, each of hemispheres has it's preferences.
There were experiments on disabling brain hemispheres by electroshock, and it appeared that human being act quite different in these situations. For example, while only left hemisphere was working, human is very rational but unemotional; with right hemisphere active, human is very emotional and cannot speak much - due to the fact, that most of the memory abstract tags like words, numbers etc. belong to left side of the brain.
This was approved by patients with brain damage or those, that had brain operation dividing major connection between hemispheres. Last one from now on felt like "double-persons" because of brains halves were functioning more independent. They had interesting effect: as hemispheres control opposite sides of the body, with their right hand they could only write, and with left hand they could draw, as right hemisphere is about right-here-right-now visual perception and left hemisphere about encoding in tags for past analysis and future prediction.
So same goes with the other senses: ears, eyes… For example, if you want to have better sense of you talking on phone, you have to get your phone to the right ear, if you want to have better understanding of emotions expressed on the other side, you'd better listen to your phone by left ear. And I believe this should work with eyesight: it's connected to have one picture but still each eye has it's angle and ending point in hemisphere.
Getting back to UI, here comes some simple suggestion: so if left part of a picture belongs to visual perception of right-now moment, and right part of a picture belongs to analytics and prediction, then why don't UI is organized in natural way? So, leave left side for monitoring battlefield, minimap and , maybe, important unit current status. And right side leave for buttons, building and so on - something to operate with.
This also would cooperate with the fact the most of the human beings are right-handed, and that means while moving mouse it's faster and more convenient to operate within the area that could be circulated around monitor lower right corner as a center of a sector.
But of course, having convenient shortcut keys would make gameplay even more pleasant for those who have passed introductionary course of a game and its UI :)
