I think the author handled it brilliantly. He only changes the saturation component to 1.0 only if it was zero and the user clicked on the outer wheel. His reasoning is that clicking on the outer wheel is a leading indicator that the user will end up changing the saturation in order to see the effective color.
This way he anticipates the needs of users. I think it is a nice usability tweak with minimal negative effects.
I've seen casual users get confounded by that aspect of the color wheel more often than not. Basically every casual user who I've seen try a color wheel for the first time makes that same mistake and gets a little confused and frustrated.
I wonder if we can generalize a UI antipattern:
- A control that the user can change
- but which has no effect due to the setting of another control
- but does nothing to indicate that state
This is one of the top reasons audio synthesizers (real and virtual) can be frustrating for even very expert users. You get caught in a situation where you are adjusting a control over and over, trying to perceive the effect, only to realize that it is doing nothing unless you change some other control that may be located far away (visually/physically/menu-wise/tabs/categories/etc) from the thing you are changing.
My biggest pet peeve is greyed out buttons. No explanation as to why you can't push the button. Just the inactive control, sitting there, taunting you.
Macs are especially bad in this regard.
Would be nice if at least a mouse over would pop up an explanation for how to reactivate it...
Your comment made me think about how to improve a synthesizer design. Even with a modular synthesizer, where in the natural state every component is tweakable, but has no effect (before you make any connections), there could be a way to provide feedback: e.g. have a light bulb whose intensity is somehow proportional to the effect the module has on the main out. Or have lighted cables that would allow to trace the signal from oscillators to the output (e.g. with a lighted dot that runs the length of the path).
I agree 100%! This is probably one of the worst things I've learned the hard way. You begin to notice that many of the hardest things to "get just right" are completely skimmed over by nearly everyone. That fancy section you spent 3 days making perfect? Nobody even looks at it.
You get a good idea of how some people have been "conditioned" for how they search for things. Depending on the market - the only thing they are looking for us a phone number or a contact form. Even when the phone number is in the header, we see people scroll straight to the bottom of the site and look for a phone number in the footer!
Sometimes it's good to have a sincere feedback from a user that won't refrain to use the exact words that crosses his/her/their mind when a problem arises, and you can trust that the normal user from your app would use the same words and then look for another app. (Or site, for what it matters).
Otherwise, how would you know that n users dropped off without telling you why?
It is really difficult to select a full black or white on that color wheel. I feel I would never want to use it in a drawing tool for that reason alone.
I did the same thing for a color app I built for adjusting CSS values using a color wheel.
Dealing with color is tricky, I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes..
One interesting bug I think I found is with NSColor/UIColor. If you set the hue for a color, and then proceed to drop the saturation/brightness to 100%/0%, it'll wipe out the hue when you change the saturation/brightness back to sensible values. It could just be something with color spaces that I don't understand, but it seems like a bug to me (data is destroyed).
I read a lot about color working on that app, and it is a pretty deep subject. You can read all about the science aspects of color, light spectrums etc. Then you read something else and realize that color is just a human sense, that is all about perception and not set in stone. All the color spaces and representations seem to have their flaws and certain adjustments don't match expectations.
To summarize I tried to learn and understand color, but in the end it all seems like a mess. I don't have an academic background, so maybe this is just a lack of understanding.
I think it is silly that the triangle actually touches the circle at three places instead of just one (i.e., the place indicative of the selected hue).
Beats me why, but every picker I've seen use a ring-and-triangle UI does that. Maybe it's for the same reason that primary colors are always 120° apart on a color wheel?
I hear comments like that from a lot of people who aren't "computer nerds." I mean, you did just call a whole class of millions of people "special," and I am pretty sure you didn't mean it positively.
Subtlety isn't their strong suit but they have a sort-of point. Perhaps he should have just shown her how to use that generic UI element: "click the outer ring to select the colour, click the triangle to select the tone".
By fixing it instead his wife will now be frustrated with every other colour wheel that uses the de facto standard behaviour.
Also, it should only jump/slide to a higher saturation if the saturation is 0, otherwise moving around the colours with a fixed but non-zero saturation wouldn't be possible.
If you're developing a half-way complex web application, you largely don't want to depend on OS default dialogs. They can be buggy, detract from the UX of the rest of your application, require additional support as now you need to explain how to use the different dialogs on N different operating systems, and it's often the case that your application is the first time the user comes into contact with that dialog anyway - they're usually not nearly as commonly used as you'd think.
Many of these comments are about the colour wheel, when in fact the real discussion should be about whether or not it was correct to change the colour wheel to satisfy his wife.
I made an infinite runner recently to try out Phaser.js, and I let me wife try it. She loves infinite runners, plays them all day. Her comment? "I hate it." Why do you hate it?
"I don't know." Well try to find one thing you don't like and tell me that.
"It's too hard."
What's hard about it? "I don't know."
If I made the player jump father when you tap the screen, would that help? "I don't know."
What about if you got more coins as you went along? "I don't know."
I showed it to a group of kids in the family, and they went nuts for it. And their feedback was much more useful! After I saw how they played it and heard their complaints and tips to each other, I changed it up and presented it to my wife again and she loved it.
> Many of these comments are about the colour wheel, when in fact the real discussion should be about whether or not it was correct to change the colour wheel to satisfy his wife.
He didn't make the change to satisfy his wife. He felt that his wife's underlying point: the wheel didn't work the way she expected, was valid, and made an adjustment.
Those usually need to be bigger to get an accurate colour selection. Also depends on the change to a colour I wish to make, if multiple colour pickers are available I usually end up using them all once in a while.
Another option would be draw the hue right using the currently selected saturation. That would mean that the color you click is the color you get, whatever the current saturation is. If the saturation is zero, then the entire ring becomes a uniform gray bar, making it clear that clicking anywhere isn't going to have an immediate effect.
But then the triangle shows only one hue. I wonder if some people wouldn't at this point decide that there is no visible way to choose other hue and give up without trying.
His webpage certainly doesn't work with JavaScript disabled.
What an exciting world we live in, when I have to give a stranger execute access on my computers in order to read his words. If only there were some way for him to send me text instead of a program.
[+] [-] koliber|9 years ago|reply
I think the author handled it brilliantly. He only changes the saturation component to 1.0 only if it was zero and the user clicked on the outer wheel. His reasoning is that clicking on the outer wheel is a leading indicator that the user will end up changing the saturation in order to see the effective color.
This way he anticipates the needs of users. I think it is a nice usability tweak with minimal negative effects.
[+] [-] Drdrdrq|9 years ago|reply
I don't have a better solution though.
[+] [-] whiddershins|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if we can generalize a UI antipattern:
- A control that the user can change
- but which has no effect due to the setting of another control
- but does nothing to indicate that state
This is one of the top reasons audio synthesizers (real and virtual) can be frustrating for even very expert users. You get caught in a situation where you are adjusting a control over and over, trying to perceive the effect, only to realize that it is doing nothing unless you change some other control that may be located far away (visually/physically/menu-wise/tabs/categories/etc) from the thing you are changing.
I find the whole discussion fascinating.
[+] [-] kstenerud|9 years ago|reply
Macs are especially bad in this regard.
Would be nice if at least a mouse over would pop up an explanation for how to reactivate it...
[+] [-] romwell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|9 years ago|reply
I did this on one of my ecommerce sites and was surprised to see how many of my assumptions on how people use a website were wrong.
[+] [-] Nadya|9 years ago|reply
You get a good idea of how some people have been "conditioned" for how they search for things. Depending on the market - the only thing they are looking for us a phone number or a contact form. Even when the phone number is in the header, we see people scroll straight to the bottom of the site and look for a phone number in the footer!
[+] [-] woliveirajr|9 years ago|reply
Otherwise, how would you know that n users dropped off without telling you why?
[+] [-] jacobriers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ruphin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudedogg|9 years ago|reply
Dealing with color is tricky, I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes..
One interesting bug I think I found is with NSColor/UIColor. If you set the hue for a color, and then proceed to drop the saturation/brightness to 100%/0%, it'll wipe out the hue when you change the saturation/brightness back to sensible values. It could just be something with color spaces that I don't understand, but it seems like a bug to me (data is destroyed).
I read a lot about color working on that app, and it is a pretty deep subject. You can read all about the science aspects of color, light spectrums etc. Then you read something else and realize that color is just a human sense, that is all about perception and not set in stone. All the color spaces and representations seem to have their flaws and certain adjustments don't match expectations.
To summarize I tried to learn and understand color, but in the end it all seems like a mess. I don't have an academic background, so maybe this is just a lack of understanding.
[+] [-] agildehaus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Practicality|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|9 years ago|reply
By fixing it instead his wife will now be frustrated with every other colour wheel that uses the de facto standard behaviour.
Also, it should only jump/slide to a higher saturation if the saturation is 0, otherwise moving around the colours with a fixed but non-zero saturation wouldn't be possible.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
HTML5 has the input type of 'color' which uses the OS's default color picker dialog.
Edit: Oops, it's dated 2010 isn't it.
[+] [-] vertex-four|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbebber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
"I don't know." Well try to find one thing you don't like and tell me that.
"It's too hard."
What's hard about it? "I don't know."
If I made the player jump father when you tap the screen, would that help? "I don't know."
What about if you got more coins as you went along? "I don't know."
I showed it to a group of kids in the family, and they went nuts for it. And their feedback was much more useful! After I saw how they played it and heard their complaints and tips to each other, I changed it up and presented it to my wife again and she loved it.
Still couldn't quantify why though.
[+] [-] balls187|9 years ago|reply
He didn't make the change to satisfy his wife. He felt that his wife's underlying point: the wheel didn't work the way she expected, was valid, and made an adjustment.
[+] [-] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
You're not married are you ...?
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls9s60OkvV1qz9jbw.jpg
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
But then again I'm not a designer...
[+] [-] Qantourisc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drb311|9 years ago|reply
That's not the old Paint, that's the new Paint!
[+] [-] munificent|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qb45|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtbob|9 years ago|reply
What an exciting world we live in, when I have to give a stranger execute access on my computers in order to read his words. If only there were some way for him to send me text instead of a program.
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vorotato|9 years ago|reply