Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a movement obsessed with removing colour, especially those whose skin colour or religious preference was different to their own. This went to great extremes, caused the greatest of all wars, and we are all aware of the terrible atrocities done as a result. It is one of the horrors of our current time that those beliefs, which we thought had been consigned to history, seem to be getting some renewed attention and following.

If faced with political extremism, the predominantly liberal groups who control and shape our technology would typically be horrified and opposed. However at the same time they are forcing on us fashions and design paradigms which in their own way are just as odious, impacting the richness of our experience, and limiting rather than improving our ability to interact with technology.

I refer, of course, to the Colour Nazis. The members of this movement probably don’t think of themselves that way, and if forced to adopt a label would choose something much more neutral, but it is becoming apparent that some of their thinking is not that different.

This is not the first time I’ve complained about this. In 2012 I wrote “Tyranny of the Colour Blind, or Have Microsoft Lost Their Mojo?”. The trouble is that things are getting worse, not better. Grappling with Office 2016 I’m coming to grips with some really dramatically stupid decisions which can only be explained by a Nazi zeal to remove the colour from our technological interactions.

Here’s a quick test. Find Open, Save and the Thesaurus in Office 2003:

Now let’s try Office 2010:

Not too bad. The white background actually helps by increasing contrast, and the familiar splashes of colour still draw your eye quickly to the right icons, although the Thesaurus is a bit anonymous. Now let’s try Office 2016:

The faded grey on a grey background colour scheme has wiped out most of the contrast, and you’d be struggling to make these out if you have ageing sight in a poor working environment. The pale pastel yellow of “Open” is still just recognisable, but the “Save ” button has turned to a weird pale purple, and the Thesaurus is completely anonymous. I’d have to go hunting by hovering over each and reading the tooltip. (Before anyone shouts, I know I’ve used an add-in menu here to get a like-for-like comparison, but all this is equally true for the full-sized ribbon controls.)

Now let’s look at a really stupid example. One of Word’s great strengths is the ability to assemble and review tracked changes from multiple reviewers. In Word 2010 each will be assigned a distinctive colour, and I can very quickly see who’s who:

OK that works well. Let’s see what they’ve done in Office 2016:

WTF! One place where colour has a specific role as an information dimension, and they’ve actually taken it away. In the document the markup does use some colour, but in the form of a few pale pastel lines. Instead the screen is cluttered up with the name of the author against every single change, which makes it unreadable if multiple authors have made changes to a single page.

I am always among the first to remind designers not to rely on colour, as it doesn’t work well for about 8% of the population, or in some viewing conditions. But that’s no reason to remove it. Instead you should supplement it (e.g. make icons both distinctive colours and shapes), or allow the users a choice. Word 2016 should allow me to choose whether to use colour or explicit names in markup balloons, and I wouldn’t be having this rant.

There is apparently a name for this fad, “Complexion Reduction” (see Complexion Reduction: A New Trend In Mobile Design by Michael Horton). The problem is that its advocates seem to have lost sight of some key principles of human-computer interaction. One of these is that for normally-sighted people there’s a clear hierarchy in how we spot or identify things:

1. Colour. If we can look for a splash of colour, that’s easiest. That’s why fire extinguishers are red, or the little red coat was so poignant in Schindler’s List.
2. Shape / position. We manage a lot of interactions by recognising shapes. That’s why icons work in the first place. We even do this when the affordance supplies text as well. If you’re a native English speaker and reader you will inevitably have tried to move a door the wrong way, because “PUSH” and “PULL” have such similar shapes, and your brain tries shapes first, text second.
3. Text. When all else fails, read the instructions. That’s not a joke, it’s a real fact about how people’s brains work. If I have to go hunting in a menu or reading tooltips, then the designer has failed miserably.

Sadly I don’t know if there’s any way to influence this. These decisions are probably being made by ultra-hip youngsters with ironic beards and 20 year old eyes who don’t really get HCI. I’d just like one of them to read this blog.

Addendum — May 2019

So the hierarchy for interactions is first colour, then shape, then text.

So please could someone explain to me why the latest versions of Android have also decided to force almost all application icons into a uniform shape (circular on my Sony phone, a rounded rectangle on my Samsung tablet) with exactly the same background colour?

On my phone, all the main Google apps now have icons which are white circles with tiny splashes of the same four colours. The Sony apps (including the main phone functions) are white circles with small icons, using the same pale blue, within them. To add an extra spice, the launcher I use occasionally moves the icons around, if I add a new front-page app or the labels change.

My poor brain has no chance whatsoever. I open my phone, and then have to READ labels to make sure I’m opening the right app. Hopeless!

There’s an interesting, but intensely annoying, behaviour by the big software companies, which as far as I’m aware has no parallel in other areas of production for consumer consumption. We’ve all been used, since the mid-20th century, to the concept of "planned obsolescence" to make us buy new things. While you might argue that this is not great in terms of use of resources, it’s accepted by consumers because the new thing is usually better than the old one. There might be the odd annoyance (as captured by Weinberg’s New Law, on which I’ve written before), but by and large if I buy a new camera, or car, or TV there are enough definite improvements to justify the purchase and any transition pain. In addition I only usually have to make a change either because the old thing has reached the end of its economic life, or the new thing has a new feature I really want.

It’s not that way with core software, and especially Microsoft products (although they are not the only offenders). The big software providers continue to foist endless upgrades on us, but I can’t see any evidence of improvement. Instead I can actually see a lot of what is known in other trades as "de-contenting", taking away useful capabilities which were there before and not replacing them.

Windows 10 continues to reveal the loss of features which worked well under Windows 7, with unsatisfactory or no replacements. I mourn the loss of the beautiful "aero" features of Windows 7 (with its semi-transparent borders and title bars)  and a number of other stylistic elements, but there are some serious functional omissions as well. I couldn’t work out why my new laptop kept on trying to latch onto my neighbour’s Wifi, rather than use my high powered but secure internal service, and discovered that there’s now no manual mechanism to sort WiFi networks or set preferences. There is, allegedly, a brilliant new automated algorithm which just makes it automatic and no bother to the user. Yeah, right. Dear Microsoft, IT DOESN’T ***** WORK. Fortunately in the way of these things I’m not the only one to complain, and literally in the last couple of weeks a helpful Belgian developer has released a tiny utility which replaces the ability to list and manipulate the WiFi networks known to a Windows 10 machine (https://github.com/Bertware/wlan10). That’s great, and the young man will be receiving a few Euros from me, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. By all means add an automatic sequencer to the new system, but leave the manual mechanism as well.

However, my real object of hate at the moment is Microsoft Office. Since I set up the new MacBook with Windows 10 it’s never been entirely happy with the combination of versions I want to use: Office 2010, plus Skype for Business 2016. (Well actually I’d really prefer to use Office 2003, but I’m over that by now :)) I’ve had the odd problem before, having to install Visio 2016 because Visio 2010 and Skype/Lync 2016 keep breaking each other. I’m not sure how that’s even possible given the "side by side" library architecture which Microsoft introduced with Windows XP, but somehow they managed it, and they clearly don’t care enough about the old versions to fix the issue.

I could live with that, but a couple of weeks ago more serious problems set it. There was an odd "blip", and then OneNote just showed blank notebooks with the ominous statement "There are no sections open in this notebook or section group". That looked like a major disaster, as I rely on OneNote both to organise my work and to-do lists on a daily basis, and as a repository of notes going back well over 10 years. However a quick check online, and on other devices revealed that my data was fine. I lost a good chunk of a working day to trying to fix the problem, including a partial installation of Office 2016 to upgrade to OneNote 2016. That’s a lot more difficult that it should be, and something Microsoft really doesn’t want you to do. Nothing worked. By the end of the day I was so messed up I did a system restore to the previous day, hoping that would restore my system state and fix the original problem. At first glance this appeared to fix Office, although OneNote was still showing blank notebooks. However I then had a moment of inspiration and went online to OneDrive.com, and clicked the "edit in OneNote" option. This magically re-synced things, and got my notebooks re-opened on the laptop. Success?

Unfortunately not. Things seemed OK for a few days, but then I started getting odd error messages, and things associated with Outlook and the email system started breaking. Apparently even a complete "System Restore" hadn’t completely restored the registry, and my system couldn’t work out which version of Outlook was installed. An office repair did no good, and eventually I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Office 2016. Even that wasn’t trivial, and took a couple of goes but eventually I got there, and my system is now, fingers crossed, stable again.

And that would be fine if Office 2016 was actually a straightforward upgrade from its predecessors, maintaining operational compatibility under a stable user interface, but that’s where I came in. The look and feel, drained of colour and visual separation, is in my opinion poorer than before but I’ll probably get used to it. I’ve got an add-in (the excellent Ubit Menu) which gives me a version of the ribbon which mimics the Office 2003 menus, and which I also used with Office 2010, so I can quickly find things. But what that can’t do is fix features which Microsoft have just removed.

Take Outlook for example. I really liked the "autopreview" view on my inbox folders. Show me a few lines of unread emails, so I can both quickly identify them and, importantly, scan the content to decide whether they need to be processed urgently and if any can just be deleted, but hide the preview once I’ve read them. Brilliant. Gone. I have multiple accounts under the same Outlook profile, which is how Microsoft tell you it’s meant to work, and in previous versions I could adjust the visual properties of the folder pane at the left so I could see all the key folders at once. Great. Gone. Now I’m stuck with a stupid large font and line separation which would be great if I was working on a tablet with my fingers and a single mail account, but I’m not. Dear Microsoft, some people still use a ****** PC and a mouse…

Or take Word. Previous "upgrade" Office installations carefully preserved the styles in the "Normal" template, so that opening a document in the new version preserved its layout. Not this time. I’ve had to go through several documents with detail page layouts and check each one.

None of this is a disaster, but it is costing me time and money and it wouldn’t be necessary if either Microsoft didn’t keep forcing us to upgrade, or if they made sure to keep backwards compatibility of key features. It’s also not just a Microsoft problem: Adobe and Apple are equally guilty (witness features lost from recent versions of OSX, or the weird user interface of Acrobat XI). The problem seems to be that the big software companies don’t seem to have a business model for just keeping our core software "ticking over", and they confuse change with improvement, which is proving to not be the case now that these systems are functionally mature and already do what people need them to do.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or even if there is an answer. We can’t take these products away from the companies, and we don’t want them to become moribund and abandoned, gradually decaying as changes elsewhere render them unusable. Maybe they need to listen harder to their existing customers, and a bit less to potential "captures", but I’m not convinced that’s going to happen. Let the struggle continue…