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Reducing all 'Home' tools to equal size, single buttons is an understandable simplification.
But making the client have a pallette of four colours and simplifying button design makes it much harder work for the end user to actually scan through the icons. This means the icons aren't doing their job, when you have to actually pay attention or read what they do instead of letting muscle memory take over.
This is particularly an issue for any icon with a page in it, because you have to repeat an image of a page multiple times whilst still making each tool distinctive. Previously, tools with the same page icon would have different colour drawings or annotations on them. So "Actual size" has green box marks around it, "Reflow" has blue text on it, "From file" has a purple line on it.
All of those details are now the same colour as the page icon (black), which now has no fill colour. All iconsnow have the same background colour.
1. Drawings in black and white cannot communicate information as well as multicolour icons.
Particularly in the same amount of space. Look at the clipboard icon- previously, a brownish rectangle with a grey line for a clip, and a white page ontop of it to show a file being added to the document. Now imagine that with no colour, black outline and grey fill- too many shapes, with no drawing space left to communicate board and document. Only fill colour could do this job in the same space.
We also don't have to imagine that drawing without colour- look at the new UI, which even with a bigger icon loses the white page because, in my opinion, it has to! Even if this is a deliberate style choice, you can still agree it would look messy with a page ontop of it. This should show the limitations of this design style!
It also relies on lines to show its a clipboard, but pages and documents have text lines, so its not a win in my books. There's still some effort required there to differentiate it from other page-shaped functions.
We also don't have to imagine that drawing without colour- look at the new UI, which even with a bigger icon loses the white page because, in my opinion, it has to! Even if this is a deliberate style choice, you can still agree it would look messy with a page ontop of it. This should show the limitations of this design style!
It also relies on lines to show its a clipboard, but pages and documents have text lines, so its not a win in my books. There's still some effort required there to differentiate it from other page-shaped functions.
There being a moon for night mode and an eye for text viewer still doesn't differentiate the pages enough. When they're small line drawings, their general shape as ovals are what stands out. There's also alot of similar icons with pages plus circles, too. Little extra line-drawn details could be added- a sky, meteors for the night- because that begs for something like colour to differentiate a busy, small drawing. Making the moon bigger on the page might be ok, but again abandoning the current style and being inferior to the old UI which had this with the moon being purple.
Put simply, line drawings have to have extra detail to compensate for a lack of colour, and with no room to do this in small icons you have to accept a less communicative UI. A pavement with grass can be two rectangles in green and grey. A line drawing probably has to have two rectangles, strands for the grass and texture to the path (We're going to ignore shading since the client has none). The current style can't be fixed with more line drawn detail, so you might make certain features alot larger, which isn't so subtle anymore and asking for colours to be used.
2. You clearly recognise that colour has some importance, but not really why, and why they worked in the original pallette.
Orange is added to "Reflow" and "Select", which struggle to distinguish themselves when they blend into the four colour palette. More importantly, I'm not sure why they earn colours, but the other icons don't, when in the previous version almost everything deserved differentiation with colours. What's changed? Why is select and reflow suddenly more important? The obvious answer why other icons don't deserve colour, is that everything would end up orange, because there's nothing left in your pallette to do the job!
3. The icons may be less overwhelming for new users, but that's because they communicate less.
There's obviously a balance to be struck, but this is too heavy in a simple direction. Your time and experience getting familiar with the client isn't matched or rewarded with anything, as the icons are as simple as a service kiosk or informational leaflet which requires understanding in 10-30 seconds. I don't want an overly complicated UI, but this is unneccessary. Strangely enough, the use of colour for simple communication in kiosks and leaflets goes missing in a UI trying to be similar to them, so I'm not sure I get what exactly the UI is doing. Probably a style thing? Even modern Microsoft Office packages have some colour in their icons, or if they don't (to memory, Google sheets), they have far less UI on show.
What clutter you may think the old home tab had was minimized by some icons being larger to show importance, and colour being communicative. If a non intrusive or gaudy pallette could be found then, why not now?
So as the title says - find a way to toggle the old UI, facilitate skins (has to be for the entire client to avoid a mismatch, too) so I can find alternatives.
Thank you!
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