Interface Clouors, There Effects on Users, What is Considered Acceptible?

Started by Cyber-Angel, October 18, 2007, 11:16:55 PM

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Cyber-Angel

Color has different effects on people and the choice of color has been shown to provide different psychological responses, these vary across cultures and other factors such as belief structures. To that end then what do people here think about the following.

Q: If you where selecting the color scheme for a GUI that was to be used in a professional setting what colors would you select as the most appropriate and why?

Q: What Color/s would be inappropriate to use in a GUI (Talk about what you'd consider unprofessional, but also weather certain colors would be not accepted for any cultural or other such reasons [GUI Internationalization]).

Q: What should the primary goal/s of color be in a GUI (E.G. Streamlining of Menu items making tools easier to find, Aid Concentration on Task etc)

Q: What should the secondary goal/s of color in a GUI be (If any)

Q: What Colors would lead you to feel cut off and/ likely to feel frustrated in a GUI?

That should be enough to get debate rolling and I am sure more will crop up, I have an interest in Human/ Computer Interaction and have been thinking about this stuff for a while and would be interested to here from the members here, the lesions form this topic could be integrated into TG2 and people here who program may wish to use them as well.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel               

dhavalmistry

I will answer the first question....

according to me, the color scheme for GUI should be something clean, clear and not messy. Like Vue6 and mojo using colors like black is totally unprofessional. It should be matching with your overall windows color scheme so that using that application would feel familiar and easy. If you have a color scheme for windows other than default, then its a whole different story!
"His blood-terragen level is 99.99%...he is definitely drunk on Terragen!"

Harvey Birdman

I'll answer the first, too - if I were developing a(nother) professional app, the color scheme(s) would be those accepted as the standard UI color scheme for the target platform. Period.

Plenty of intelligent people have put plenty of thought into existing standard color schemes. The reasons/issues considered include precisely those you list in the following questions. If you want your app to have a minimal learning curve with users, one thing you can (and ALWAYS should do) is follow existing UI guidelines for color and UI element behavior. Nothing frustrates an experienced system user more than having to throw all expected/learned UI behaviors out the window and being forced to learn a new scheme unique to just 1 app. Particularly when the new behaviors seem to be different from the standard for no better reason than simply a desire to be different.

Can you say 'Blender'?

(vomit emoticon).