Day after day I see questions about which UI mods are useful, essential, important, and worse, misinformation or outright wrong recommendations. In this guide I will provide you with my evaluation of common UI mods. As the title of this post will already tell you, my focus will be the importance and the impact of those mods on your improvement in 1v1. My list will have no particular order. If you are above 2000 1v1 rating you can draw your own conclusions.
ecomanager: Not recommended. The autopausing features will hinder the development of your eco balancing ability and instill bad habits. The only use cases for this mod are very specific scenarios like large scale teamgames in controlled scenarios.
Selection Deprioritizer: Not relevant / rather not recommended. The apm/brain energy this drains is not worth the minor payoff for better unit control. Having to switch selection priority in specific scenarios takes time/attention and teaches you bad unit positioning habits. Can be more useful in teamgame scenario.
Advanced target priorities: Recommended. This mod does not directly influence anything, so you can start using it at any point. Useful for stuff like t1 arty drops killing the right stuff.
UI Party: Recommended/not relevant. Not a specific feature of this, but it being not intrusive makes it at least not harmful.
Spread Move: Recommended/not relevant. Small use case, but not intrusive. OK mod.
Idle engineers: Not recommended. Clutters the screen and the default game already supplies plenty methods of dealing/recognizing idle engies.
Supreme score board: Recommended. Just a nicer scoreboard especially for teamgames with no downside.
Better reclaim view: Recommended. Great improvement over the generic reclaim view.
Additional Camera Stuff: Recommended. Adds stuff like functional camera positions and similar. Depending on your playstyle it can be nice. Not a must though.
NoShake: Recommended. Shake is annoying.
Selection Cost UI: Not relevant.
Advanced Strategic Icons: Extremely strong NOT recommended. I would go as far as saying that this mod will completely destroy your ability to improve past a certain level. The reasoning is the incredible clutter, completely filling your screen and taking your overview/ability to select things away. I would suggest you finding a version that only changes SMD/SML if that is your reason for using it, but thats where it ends. You wont be able to develop the gamesense you need if you blind out half of the information the game offers to you. No top player uses this mod.
Disperse Move: Recommended/not relevant. Small use case but not negative impact. Essentially the same as spread move afaik.
Zep_MiniMapZoom: Recommended/Not relevant. I personally dont use it due to not liking stuff disappearing and appearing all the time, but it is a solid idea and I can see people getting a small benefit from it.
Sequentially upgrading mex: Not recommended. Basically a worse version of ecomanager, which I already didnt recommend.
That should cover most common UI mods - if I forgot some let me know.