Taoffi's blog

prisonniers du temps

Microsoft case: going monochrome

On the Windows Phone 8, the latest MSFT phone OS, you have a nice Theme selection option, which says:

"Change your phone's background and accent color to suit your mood today, this week or all month"

Quite attractive!

The feature proposes two settings:

  • Background
  • Accent color

 

On 'Background', you have two options: Light / Dark

On 'Accent color', you have a palette of 21 colors (which seems to be a pretty little choice on a device that, according to the manufacturer, can display 65000 colors or more!)

I should admit, that not having a choice is in a way less time consuming. May be this was the initial OS designer's intended objective.

 

Now let us leave WP and go back to the desktop machine to have a look at Microsoft Office 2013.

Here too, you have a nice feature to select your theme.

You have the choice between:

  • White
  • Light gray
  • Dark grey

 

The difference between the three is really too subtle:

I tried them all, and ended up by selecting 'Dark': a little more readable!

On another point: after all the literature about the 'user interface design guidelines', it now seems that Microsoft Office apps are the only applications that can keep being outside of any graphical constraints. Those guys are really too spoiledJ

 

Conclusion

It seems that someone at MSFT has decided to re-form our education about colors. The 'monochrome' seems to be the new MSFT User Interface Strategy (you can check yourself: Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 2013…)

Some people may find this abusive… but, in a way, we are much less embarrassed with this new reduced theme strategy… we may gain more time to think about things more useful!