Blue Christmas

Michael Dain, Thursday, December 27, 2007 @ 3:38 pm

I took time out this Christmas season to reformat my hard drive. Yes, it seems pitiful when you work with these machines all day, and have a chance to spend quality time with loved ones how machine maintenance would top the list of things to do. However, it did give me a chance to mull over a bit of design mystery which seemed a decent enough present to share with you all. Cozy up to the fire and let me tell thee about Windows Vista.
Being a Mac user, I do have a generally favorable impression of the Redmond efforts, I have a healthy background in their CMS system Sharepoint, and felt as long as you keep up to date on their latest and greatest (read beta) releases, you can almost forgive them for not being more mac-like. So armed with my copy of parallels, I installed versions of XP and Vista, and when my hard drive went belly up I decided to keep just the Vista version. Vista has a great deal of interesting abilities. I am a big fan of the voice dictation software/interface. In a quiet room, it is almost faster than typing. I think the paradigm of the 'explorer bar' is pretty well conceived mashup of a breadcrumb menu plus drop-downs. I'm surprised not to see a web version of this, since it really does have a fairly good affordance to the user of traversing a deep directory structure.

What really bothers me about the switch is the overall 'blueness' of the interface. It's relentless, and of course being good web 2.0 citizens, they got their gradient on, so its basically blue gradients for miles. Now, giving them credit, aqua (mac os x's first scheme) had the same problem, blue gradients for days, and the extraneous grey pinstripe thing, but yet it didn't seem as gratuitous as Vista. This is coupled with the inability to 'go grey' as XP used to allow. So, by redecorating, vista has 'painted' itself into a corner, unless users are expected to select their own gradient mixes (yellow to orange, puce to purple) they are somewhat stuck with blue. Also knowing microsoft, these are just bitmaps, so no redecorating is possible without replacing a bunch of .BMP's someplace deep in the WIN32 folder.

At the same time, Apple's Leopard has removed all hints of ever styling the chrome of their windows, even the pinstripe thing is removed and has gone all grey. They have also been having some fun with drop shadows (the 'other' gradient), in early beta's, and in Steve's intro speech, they spoke of how active windows really stand out. That was because active windows had about 100 pixels of drop shadow built in - which they wisely dumped. Overall, no color seems the best choice, in a black text on grey world, it tends to de-emphasize things well enough to let the user focus on the content at hand, photos, and clickable things (hopefully blue).

So, overall, why blue? If we look to web design, its pretty much the default color. It is hard to find a site that does not use blue as a background or decorative accent. Of course it is the 'real' clickable link color, and it is the color of azure sky in deepest summer, which is not a bad thing at all. In fact, since red is out, and yellow is kind of tricky, you pretty much have blue as your only possible primary color choice. However, color wheel not withstanding, it is hard to understand why blue has so much power over our virtual lives. About.com claims it's the color most preferred by men. It is also peaceful, tranquil, and productive. It is the least appetizing color- perhaps why foodtv chose green?

Perhaps web 2.0 has brought a reaction to this overall blueness, noting ebay has gone with yellow, but there will still be a strong reason to pick blue, it's like choosing IBM (pun intended) or the reason Microsoft is still the best choice for many reasons, nobody got fired choosing blue. Every other color has strong emotions tied to it, and neutrality (read grey) while being most suited to 'new' web design tends not to excite people too much. I actually have a difficult time finding a site where blue is not the predominant non-meaningful color. So, while I'm scouring google scholar for some actual research statistics on this phenomenon, please leave your comments on what interfaces sucessfully break this blue flu, and have a happy 2008!

user experience design

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   You are spot on regarding Vista’s overuse of blue. And the timing of your post is kinda eerie — I just posted a note about “Vista Blues” as well. See

   http://www.curiouschap.com/?p=47

   Comment by Hisham Abboud, Thursday, December 27, 2007 @ 5:41 pm

2. 

   My chicken-and-egg question is whether blue (especially for the web) gains credibility from the branding of giants such as IBM, Dell and AT&T, or whether those companies chose blue because of its intrinsic appeal?

   PS: it would be great if your post images clicked through to a larger version.

   Comment by Marla Erwin, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 @ 8:41 pm

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