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I find this an absolutely fascinating topic and could talk for hours on it. A few years ago when working on Davendale, we were able to do a load of playtesting where we watched various people play RuneScape for the first time and honestly it's mind-blowing the tiny details that new players stumble over.
I'm not going to lie and say the UI is perfect, but last year we created a new New Player default UI and saw an improvement - players were playing longer with it than the previous version. Check it out, very simple changes but as a summary we group similar interfaces together and make core gameplay like chat and the combat action bars front and centre.
However, I think for your average player to reach the point where the UI is problematic is way further down the line than people expect. Here's some examples of things I saw that were bigger tripping points early on:
- Unable to progress chat because they kept clicking outside the box
- Putting themselves into walk mode and then saying the game felt 'very slow'
- Quitting the game because the Burthorpe tutorial tasked them to kill a rabbit (FYI we've changed that one)
- Lack of guidance as soon as the tutorial finishes
I could go on and on, but I think it's useful to understand that for a genuine new player they're just trying to get to grips with the world and from what I experienced, the interface was rarely the problem in the very early days. I do, however, think it becomes more and more important the longer they play.
I'd love to make further improvements to the interface system as a whole - sharing is one idea, but I'd also love to explore simplifying things like the ribbon and the interface system as a whole. Anyway thought I'd drop in and just share some thoughts from someone who has recently worked on this :)