There's no denying the fact that eye candy is increasing in the commercial operating system's user interface. My guess would be that if the OS looks good, it's going to sell well, although it's also interesting to note that many people go even further with their user interfaces and pimp it out until it's barely recognizable. Does this eye candy make the operating system more enjoyable? Or does it just wear off and get in the way, sort of like that "in style" wallpaper you put on your walls?
I say this as I'm going through a minimalistic phase in my life (well, at least my computer life). At the moment I'm using wmii as my primary window manager, and I'm using more and more command line applications as replacements for previously GUI-based ones.
As already stated, the average user seems to enjoy the eye candy (enough to buy an operating system almost solely based on it, in some cases), so I decided to take my question to the tech forums to see what computer geeks thought of it. Sadly, the thread didn't receive much response, but the majority of the users seemed to dislike extra eye candy and preferred a minimal interface. Some of the reasons were:
- Affects system performance
- UI is more difficult to use
- Just don't need it
There weren't any reasons stating why they liked eye candy, although I did find another thread that had drifted onto this topic, and one user argued that he/she was a computer graphics person, and needed color and eye candy to spark the imagination. It would be interesting to find out whether people who are more creative-minded tend to like their operating systems more colorful, and if practical people (e.g. programmers) like a more minimalistic interface. Unfortunately I don't have the resources to conduct such research, but it was interesting to find out what I did.
Labels: eye candy, simplicity, user interface
