Monday, June 27, 2011

Humorous design decision of the day: Color coding titles

We are replacing a couple of spreadsheets with a web application. One set of spreadsheets had data separated/categorized into "orange section" and "green section". These were the background colors of the data in those sections. This data really belonged in a wiki, but that is another story. Anyway, everyone started referring to the data by color: like "Is that the orange data or the green data?" The users did not want to lose the distinction of the colors because now every one refers to the orange data and the green data instead of their proper names (which are pretty ambiguous). To keep the orange and green I made the background colors of the page names orange and green to match the spreadsheet. When we showed these pages to the customers they were very excited that we managed to incorporate their color scheme into the application. Sometimes it is the small things that matter the most to the customer.

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