The colours present in a user interface can be critical for the success or failure of a web site. When told this people will say “what’s the best colour then.” Well there is no clean cut answer to this one. And from a design view point one has to fall back on “it depends”.
You see colour has a profound effect on our emotions, our well being and psychological response. This is supplemented by the tonal nature of the colours as well and the current environment and lighting you are viewing the site in.
Tagged: color, colours, cool, culture, psychology, theory, ui, userinterface, using+colour, ux, warm, webdesign
The other day I was floored and humbled as I regularly am during a session of usability testing for a site prototype. Up to this point the testing and functionality determination had gone well. Then someone put a massive road block in the way. There it was sticking up out of the ground blocking all findability of the core information on a site. Well maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it did make me think; which is good.
Now I am not a fan of Facebook and its closed garden of social networking, I tried it all out, I got bored, simple. I find the application just an endless spammer with notifications from zombies, to the colouring of someones dog’s left nipple. Frankly I just don’t want to know about most of it. My life is just way too busy for most of Facebook. I have also stayed away for the addictive games (sorry Kay) in Facebook as well, for good reason.
I was watching a young child play with one of those massage chairs the other day at a furniture store. Now they had never seen one of these before, but I was amazing to see how they responded. They sat down on the chair, and immediately began start pressing the buttons. Seeking out the largest buttons first, and then the green ones. A few attempts and they had the chair powered up. They then started to cycle through the options in order to find the settings that suited them, using the details on the LCD display. Now this child is not able to read yet, so the words on the buttons are meaningless. The amazing thing about this was that within a few minutes they had the chair configured the way they wanted it. They just muddled through it and with the use the graphics on the LCD to configured the chair. In some ways they had the chair operational in a shorter time period than some adults.
