There is something that always ever so slightly irks me whenever I play World of Warcraft. It’s really a detail, but I think it shows how importance and meaning is conveyed by design.

Whenever you have to do one of these “Go get me”-quest, you’ll have a tracker at the right side of your screen, showing – well, what exactly?

I would like to know what I still have to gather. This would be the information I would like to see foregrounded.

But the designers at Blizzard did something else. They put the emphasis on the things you’ve already achieved, making that part of the message light up.

Now I wonder of course: Does it change the perception of the players, enhance their fun when they see what they have already done instead of being constantly reminded what they still have to do?

I wouldn’t want to see the count of slaughtered minions I need to have until I’m at level 70 – but then again, when I’m playing, I’m mostly interested in what I lack until I can complete the quest.

It may just be two shades of gray, but it illustrates the job of every good information designer: weighting information by importance, and moving those information pieces accordingly into the fore-, respectively background – and by doing that, new meaning can evolve through the importance those pieces get.¹