Generally, L4D's GUI takes the minialist approach. This can be seen in the game play GUI, which is basically made up of 3 main regions of information which the player requires to know while playing. They are namely the health indictor (at the bottom of the screen), the inventory (on the right) and the status of events (on the left) as shown in the red boxes marked out in the image below.
All extra information which are not used so often/ important can be called up using other buttons, such as the 'Tab' button can bring up the scoring chart of the players and the 'X' button can bring up the voice commands. This design is simple yet visually attractive and players do not need to remember which key map to which voice command etc. As such, players do not need to think/ recall too much which allows them to enjoy & focus on the game more.
However, the voice command interface did not follow the convention way of how other FPS games such as Counter-strike and Battlefield did theirs. Players will take some time to understand how to execute the voice chat. Traditionally, player can just execute "X" followed by the number eg. "1" to execute the first voice command. This list of commands are usually numbered and situated on the left of the screen. In L4D, the commands appear in the center of the screen, arranged in a circular manner, player would have to move the mouse in the direction where the voice command is. The image below illustrates this idea.
It might be hard for user to understand how it works initially, but it is actually more useful than traditional way of implementation in term of visibility as the fonts are bigger and more centralised to where the player is focusing while playing. Hence, this allows player to react quickly which is especially useful for a fast-paced game like such.
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