You can use a colored by class option.

Oh, I'm aware, and that's exactly what I do in my current setup. The low contrast thing seems to be a pretty consistent default theme in a lot of the current UI compilations that I've been seeing lately though.

Agreed. I'm a big fan of class-colouring the bars. Although, If I could reliably colour the bars by melee/ranged/healer/tank I'd probably prefer that. It would make it really easy to see where my priorities should be (keep the tanks up, and if it's between a healer or some other dude keep the healer up). But I settle for colouring the bars by class.

Dark grid bars when you're healing just isn't that nice to me... makes me feel like everyone's dead.

I like a basic green with red-if-has-aggro thing for my healing frames. That an option out of the gate for this UI?

I completely agree. I've been using this UI for a few weeks, off and on. I tried it with the DPS setup, and just added healbot, so I can toggle even more quickly as a shaman. Very nice setup, but too much gray. The fonts are also painful on a 15" MacBook Pro, so I'm going to fiddle with settings a bit more.

As a part-time healer (healers and tanks are pretty much all I play), I'm kind of surprised that so many other healers feel this way. Monochrome player bars are the best thing that's ever happened to me in terms of reaction time and eye strain.

Right now, my UI looks pretty similar to this, though if I could box up just the health bars and tweak them slightly that would be awesome. The benefit of all the health bars being the same color with a different, solid color for the background is contrast. My brain isn't worrying about green versus red versus orange versus blue. If someone has aggro, their frame border is bright red. Contrast. That's the only red anywhere. If someone is cursed, their border is bright purple. Again, contrast. That purple sticks out like a sore thumb.

I can easily see the blank space that means health deficit and efficiently address it. Much more efficiently than if I was worrying about the hunter's green bar versus the shaman's teal and the warlock's violet.

To each their own, of course; but to healers tempted to use this UI but hesitant due to all the negative replies about monochrome health bars, please do give it a try. It's made a world of positive difference in my healing and I wouldn't go back to anything else.

I tried back = normal bars for a while and found that my performance wasn't as good.

Class colours do make things so much easier, especially with triage when I am quite happy to let a certain class die over another. (Sorry rogues on trash pulls).

Personally I use the grey colours as range/DC/AFK/Dead, I find that information is far better suited for the task. I tend to use dark purples for magic and dark olives for poisons to assist with cleaning too.

With the current in-game config you can set the colour of the unit frames to anything you would like, you can't colour based on health but Elv is adding new features everyday and maybe making a request in his section on the Tukui forums would help. I personally love this UI and have found it fairly easy to configure.