Cool, hope we can return to the land of color from oceans of monochrome. 😀
Within reason, though. Color is also meaningless when it’s everywhere.
You’re both right, IMHO. Washed-out colorless designs and angry fruit salad overly-colorful designs are both bad at conveying information. And hopefully they keep colorblind folks in mind, too.
I’m not aware if someone did serious usability research on UI in the last 10 years, but earlier iterations concluded that color is useful.
It can be, but I am thinking if Microsoft were to make every system tray icon display various colors, it wouldn’t be any more readable than the current monochrome icons. The advantage of the battery indicator alone having color is that you can notice it out of the corner of your eye and immediately interpret it without having to pick it out from among several other colorful icons.
