What do the different Vista toolbar colors mean?
One of the first things I noticed in Windows Vista were the toolbars. Certainly they’re prettier now, and the fact that the main menu is on the way out is exciting. But the most interesting thing is that they’re different colors. Windows Explorer gets a blue-green toolbar, Windows Mail and Windows Calendar are blue, Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Gallery are black, and Internet Explorer gets a silver variant. This seems like a cool way to divide up the built-in apps, but the question that comes immediately to my mind is what color a third-party app should choose. It turns out that the Vista User Experience Guidelines are silent on this issue.
Fortunately everettm over at the Shell:Revealed blog was able to answer this question in the comments. To summarize, the recommendation is that all third-party apps use the silver toolbars. The colors are reserved for Windows branding, with blue-green standing for core Windows components like the shell, black for media apps, and blue for PIM/organization apps.
While I appreciate the response, I’m not sure I like that answer. I really like the colored toolbars, and I’d love to have my apps integrate more with the general look and feel of Vista by picking the toolbar color that is most appropriate to my application. For example, if I went to a toolbar-only UI for PNGGauntlet, I might consider going with the black toolbar, since it is an image manipulation app. Hopefully by that time the UX Guidelines will have been updated to give more explicit (and more permissive) guidance on toolbar colors.
Tags: design, UI, Windows Vista
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April 28th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Thank you for the reference to the information on the toolbar color choices. It’s an interesting strategy!
I haven’t done any programminng on Vista yet, so I’m curious: What sort of enforcement is there for the toolbar policy? Is the choice of toolbar color simply an option you set when you are instantiating the toolbar, and if so, is there anything stronger than guidelines preventing Joe Coder from using the Vista API to instantiate a blue-green toolbar?
I’m reminded of when Apple added “brushed metal” to their GUI toolkit as a branding tool. It was originally intended for applications that served as hardware interfaces, such as iTunes (to an iPod), iPhoto (to cameras), and iSync (to PDAs). This was made clear in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, but the policy became fairly universally ignored; I myself used the brushed metal for a simple alarm clock application I’d cooked up because the window definition allowed for mousedown on any non-control section of the window to initiate drag (handy for a small app that I wanted to whip out, set, and slide away). Eventually, Apple broke their own HIG rules by using brushed metal for Finder windows. The policy is dead now, as far as I know.
I’ll be interested to see whether or not this branding policy survives, or if people begin to simply ignore it and use whatever color scheme suits their interface concept.
On a related note: You mentioned that you’re glad to see the ‘main menu’ concept going away. I’ve heard this feeling expressed by a couple of people, but I’ve never really been able to understand the appeal of the disappearance of the main menu. I like customizable toolbars, but I also like having all the commands the program can execute constantly available without having to turn to customization to add buttons to the toolbar. Is there any discussion on this issue to which I could be directed?
As always, your blog is well worth the read. I look forward to your next post!
Take care,
Mark
April 28th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Well, the branding policy isn’t actually even written down anywhere - as I said, all my info is from everettm’s comment to me on the Shell:Revealed blog. I don’t think there’s any enforcement in the code, either (nor can I imagine how there would be). That said, I don’t directly use the Win32 controls because I stay solidly in managed code. My plan was to use the ToolStripRenderer facilities to fake the new look, like Josh Einstein does.
My suspicion is that people will end up using whatever toolbar color they feel like (or not use colored toolbars at all, since it’s just easier to use the old-style toolbars).
As for the main menus, their demise is certainly to be celebrated. First, it marks a shift to much simpler programs. A main-menu-less app should have only a few, clear functions that are exposed either as toolbar buttons or inside the main interface, HTML-style. This is reinforced by the recommendations to use Explorer panes, and the whole WPF/XAML thing that makes desktop apps more like web pages. The second reason is that menus are terrible for discovery, memorization, and just general usability. It’s just a bunch of lists of short names for commands you can’t remember, all hidden behind a click. Much better to actually think about the needs of your app and the workflow it enables than to cram menus full of obscure functions with nonsensical names.
Oh, and you can also get the menu back using the “Alt” key in most apps. Because one thing the main menu IS good for is keyboard accessibility. Although if you look at the newly main-menu-less Office 2007, they do some much cooler things for keyboard accessibility.