Usability - Colors & Web Applications
Colors & Web Applications
The success of a software relies on number of factors. Some of the factors are good features, good UI and Usability, excellent support, easy learning curve and most importantly, the value-for-money.
Colors and Aesthetics add an extra value to the software. But they ALONE may not sell the software. Depending on the web application and domain, colors and aesthetics should be properly used to make the best out of it. So you may ask or wonder how to figure out whether a web application requires more excellent colors and aesthetics?
Well, as of I know…there is no definite rules here. But I have few suggestions. It may work well for you. First classify whether your software/product is a techie product or productivity/office product or personal entertainment product.
I classify techie products are the ones used by technical guys, i.e the software for systems management, server management, bandwidth monitoring etc. They are a niche segment. These products deal with sensitive data in %, 7 digit decimal accuracy, uptimes, downtimes, traffic etc. The Producttivity / office products are those used in daily office life, like word processors, spreadsheets, page designers, image editors, mail clients, browsers etc. Personal entertainment products are those MP3 music players, video players, streaming movie clients etc. Some software may fall into the union set of any two categories.
Most of the applications which fall into the above 3 categories are now offering web clients / web applications too. Techie products which runs a server at the back-end, now offers “access-from-anywhere” type web-based interface to interact. And, many of the productivity products too, have started appearing as web-application editions. Google’s online word processor, Zoho’s Writer, mail clients (yahoo mail beta) are already available with a very strong user base. And with the advent of streaming flash, anyone can now build a flash based video player easily with Flash SDK. YouTube.com is a classic example. As of now, there are many web applications available for techie products and productivity products.
So when it comes to coloring, I would suggest the techie web apps does not require that much focus on skins/themes. Many techie web app user interfaces,that display status using colored icons, or statistical colored charts should use color themes judiciously. Take care that your theme/skin does not over-shadow the mission-critical status icons or charts. When there is a importance to data, show the data. Don’t hide it among jazzy graphic themes. For example, a system admin who uses a web-app to monitor the status of all critical devices will prefer to see a dashboard, which shows the device status in colors. Say, green LED icon for device up-and-running,blinking red LED icon for problem etc. So in such user-interface, care should be taken not to introduce distracting colors/themes.
Where as, in some monotonous web apps, say for example a spread sheet , where large amount of text appears in black with white background, you can give different type of colors/themes to the application’s interface to enhance the user-experience. Enhancing the interface with subtle and peppy colors will help to reduce the visual boredom.
Concluding, I would say, colors/themes and skins are very subjective and directly relates to the type of web application. Just make sure your web application uses colors/themes judiciously. 
- Dharma
(Note : My suggestions may not be 100% applicable to all web applications. And my suggestions are based on my experiences with other web applications as well as the products I have worked on. Feel free to share your views. )