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Comment by altmind | Hacker News Reader

I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.

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I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)

At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.

Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.

What's most infuriating about Office icons is how they change complete look and feel of the launcher icons for the various programs so often, even the color scheme...

And then they ripped the text labels out of the Windows taskbar, as if we are supposed to remember what the icon for Word and Outlook looks like today.

Yes, even the darn color scheme. What color was outlook? Look for the yellow icon, no the blue, wait not Word... you can't even see the embossed O?

I honestly don't know how the most loathed form of support, phone support, can even do it these days.

I tend to agree color is another channel of communication, but you need to think the UI that way from the bottom-up. If they wanted grayscale buttons, they'd need them easily recognizable by both new and old users. This was not the case except for the most basic ones.

Did they run labs with actual users to check how they reacted to the monochrome icons?

If you do that well, you can use color to convey another dimension, much like it layers meaning on top of source code (by coloring keywords, variables, comments, etc)

That's funny, they tried this with a beta of Visual Studio 2013 as well, and rolled it back.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/intr... (the hilarious original annoucement)

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNew... (commentary)

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... (a rollback)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/... (Visual Studio 2017 icon color pallette and guidelines)

The UI for VS 2013 was an absolute disgrace!

It's unbelievable it was even implemented, let alone released.

The "remove color from all the toolbar icons" thing also happened with Firefox Quantum. And you're right, it's so weird. Perhaps it's a side effect of the ongoing transition to ubiquitous "big", touch-friendly buttons, where a combination of large size and full color would be overly distracting.

The idea is to increase the contrast between content and chrome, by making chrome itself less visually contrasting.

I don't buy into it, though. They tried monochrome grey icons in Visual Studio 2012, and people hated it, for good reasons. So now VS icons have colors again.

Yeah, windows phone 7 was iirc Microsoft's first foray into flat/monochrome design, and in some ways it was wonderful... WP7 had a hyper-consistent design language that made normally-confusing flat UIs a dream... But ditching color in icons in favour of simple silhouettes was not one of its better ideas, and MS is still trying to make that a thing sometimes like 8 years later.

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