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I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including
by gxx 8y ago
I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)
At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.
Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.
- Pxtl 8y agoWhat's most infuriating about Office icons is how they change complete look and feel of the launcher icons for the various programs so often, even the color scheme... And then they ripped the text labels out of the Windows taskbar, as if we are supposed to remember what the icon for Word and Outlook looks like today.
- mjevans 8y agoYes, even the darn color scheme. What color was outlook? Look for the yellow icon, no the blue, wait not Word... you can't even see the embossed O? I honestly don't know how the most loathed form of support, phone support, can even do it these days.
- rbanffy 8y agoI tend to agree color is another channel of communication, but you need to think the UI that way from the bottom-up. If they wanted grayscale buttons, they'd need them easily recognizable by both new and old users. This was not the case except for the most basic ones. Did they run labs with actual users to check how they reacted to the monochrome icons? If you do that well, you can use color to convey another dimension, much like it layers meaning on top of source code (by coloring keywords, variables, comments, etc)