Apple fans love Aqua, the visual theme for the Mac OS X user interface. The color blue is omnipresent on the Mac, on scrollbars, buttons, menu selections, progress bars, and in many other widgets. That lends a certain consistency to the user interface (if you ignore the brushed metal anomalies in apps such as Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).
They went one step further in the blue-ification of the user interface, and added liberal amounts of blue to most of the icons of the default applications. Thus, we get something like the screenshot below:
The problem is obvious: the similarity in all these icons slows you down when switching from one application to another. Because they all look alike, users need to spend a moment or two to make sure they're selecting the correct app. If each icon had a unique color, the color difference would act as a redundant encoding in addition to the shape and appearance of the icon. This can significantly enhance response time, as has been shown in human factors research.
While consistency is desirable for widgets, it is the opposite case for application icons.
0 comments:
Post a Comment