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User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

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Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#41

Post by kyberias »

chewxy wrote: post #19
yuchi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot to discuss here. I personally cannot read through light-on-dark digital designs. After a few lines everything blurs. With dark-on-light on the opposite I can read for hours. Most probably is due to a non-optimal screen both at home and work-place, but I suffer from the same issue even on 2010 iMacs. But the most pleasant scheme for me (I mean, my eyes) is light-gray-on-dark-gray.

It's the contrast between the text/content and the background that affects your comfort though. There was an article about how you should never use black for your text on a white bg[0]. I think the points there are rather salient. In fact the W3C has a good calculator for colour contrast [1], which I think is a good guide for calculating colour contrast when designing sites [0] http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-ne…

I think there are no points in [0] what so ever to support the claim than one should not use black (#000). The author does not argue at all. All he does is present a photo he has taken which does not have black pixels. What the hell is that supposed to prove?

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#42

Post by gasull »

DustinCalim wrote: post #13

I don't agree with Hedonism being the driving force behind dark websites. I prefer dark(and spend all day coding with a dark background) because it's easier on my eyes... The idea behind skeuomorphism in webpages mimicking paper has proven itself when the print industry attempted to carry their print practices over to the web and failed. The internet is still very young; I think what we will find over time as more an…

Easy solution for Firefox:

http://superuser.com/a/181293

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#43

Post by kintamanimatt »

I wonder if these color schemes are chosen primarily because it's what's traditional and expected; we don't like to surprise our users/customers as it may induce negative feelings, including a lack of trust. For example, we expect a fashion website to look different to a web app, and when something is discordant with our preconceived notions we trust it less. I think that typically designers intuitively go for a less-surprising aesthetic rather than an atypical one whose aesthetic induces a degree of trust-eroding cognitive dissonance.

The one utilitarian site I can think of that breaks the author's pattern is Wufoo; bold colors, utilitarian purpose. They seem to be quite successful too. Having said that, a single counterexample doesn't diminish the validity of the author's central thesis, but it might just be one notch in the larger key.

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#44

Post by chewxy »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #43

I wonder if these color schemes are chosen primarily because it's what's traditional and expected; we don't like to surprise our users/customers as it may induce negative feelings, including a lack of trust. For example, we expect a fashion website to look different to a web app, and when something is discordant with our preconceived notions we trust it less. I think that typically designers intuitively go for a less…

I don't disagree that designers choose a less threatening aesthetics that incorporates familiarity. Pandering to the lowest common denominator eventually leads to the most familiar of features - GOOG is just a box and two buttons, for example.

I would also argue that the Formerly-Known-As-MetroUI pattern is also rather utilitarian. It was designed to have a low information density, but highly relevant information - that is to say, show less, but show higher quality information.

Too bad people have constantly misused those great ideas in patterns tho

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#45

Post by ANTSANTS »

DustinCalim wrote: post #13

I don't agree with Hedonism being the driving force behind dark websites. I prefer dark(and spend all day coding with a dark background) because it's easier on my eyes... The idea behind skeuomorphism in webpages mimicking paper has proven itself when the print industry attempted to carry their print practices over to the web and failed. The internet is still very young; I think what we will find over time as more an…

I have to wonder if the average user of a light-on-dark color scheme simply has their monitor's brightness turned up too high.

I have my brightness turned down pretty low on every display I own, to the point that even a pure white screen can bearably be looked at. I prefer dark-on-light color schemes because I can turn my monitor's brightness down even lower with them, and I don't have to adjust my eyes or monitor when visiting web sites (most of which are dark-on-light). Why bother fighting the entire web with custom CSS to match your text editor when you can make the defaults comfortable to look at?

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#46

Post by statusgraph »

bravura wrote: post #38
iota wrote: post #17

The fight against "default" white seems analogous to Ian Storm Taylor's recommendation to never use black ( http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/ ). I prefer off white (e.g., #f9fafc) because of the same reason I like text color set at #333 — it looks softer, but still almost imperceptibly different from #fff/#000's traditional "paper and ink" aesthetic. http://www.colorcodehex.com/f9fafc/ http://www.…

I believe in using a black background for talk slides. Example: http://new.livestream.com/gigaom/gigaomroadmap/videos/579403... I would prefer dark gray from an aesthetic perspective. But the reason I choose black is simple: Often, the LCD projector is not pointed straight at the backdrop or maximized correctly. If your slide background is not black, there is a perceptible margin, and your slide area is shaped like a…

White on black is very hard to see in a brightly lit room. Many programming talks like that color scheme and it just doesn't work with crappy projectors.

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#47

Post by tommikaikkonen »

shasta wrote: post #2

Author: Search for "pleasuraigh".

Author here, thank's for pointing that out. I just put my blog online yesterday morning, and this was an article that I had written back in the summer in HTML markup. Seems like there were some conversion errors to Markdown that I didn't notice.

Erroneous: Research shows that consumers with a utilitarian motivation find a low-arousal environment more pleasuraigh-arousal one.

Fixed: Research shows that consumers with a utilitarian motivation find a low-arousal environment more pleasurable than a high-arousal one.

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#48

Post by yuchi »

kyberias wrote: post #41
chewxy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the contrast between the text/content and the background that affects your comfort though. There was an article about how you should never use black for your text on a white bg[0]. I think the points there are rather salient. In fact the W3C has a good calculator for colour contrast [1], which I think is a good guide for calculating colour contrast when designing sites [0] http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-ne…

I think there are no points in [0] what so ever to support the claim than one should not use black (#000). The author does not argue at all. All he does is present a photo he has taken which does not have black pixels. What the hell is that supposed to prove?

I should redirect you to the interesting discussion happened on Ian's article here on HN.

About eye stress.. that's another story. Could anyone here point us to a scientific paper out there?

Re: User Motivation Determines the Best Color Scheme for Your Website

#50

Post by hollerith »

majormajor wrote: post #35
lucian1900 wrote: post #21

Because of the historical accident of paper being white and ink being dark. The human eye is somewhat better at reading light-on-dark, but most people aren't used to it.

But there's also the historical accident of early computers primarily using light-on-dark displays (I always found amber-on-black mode less harsh on the eyes than green-on-black, personally—but just don't get me started on white-on-blue, bah!), which we then moved away from in favor of dark on light. (If I had to guess the reason for that historical accident, I'd think it had to do with "white" not being a particular…

>If I had to guess the reason for that historical accident, I'd think it had to do with "white" not being a particularly uniform color on a lot of older CRTs, but one with varying hue and intensity in different regions.

also, the earlier monitors flickered more than later ones, and the flicker was more troublesome when the default/background color was light.

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