I appreciate the proactive manner in which you are constantly updating the site…but at times, updates for the sake of it are not always in the best interests of the site.
The last update was good…very good…the most recent one however, I feel has taken you backwards.
Anyway, my honest technical assessment follows…
Colour is a catastrophe...lime greens induce tension and schizophrenic responses and will limit the time people spend on the site. Most will be in a poor mental state by the end of each day, both stressed from the hue vibration between the lime/white eye transference, as well as just plain visually fatigued due to the lack of hue offsetting, or “balance” from single spectrum viewing.
I have a little test for everyone to do…
1. Place a white piece of paper in front of you, make sure there is plenty of light in the room.
2. Place a small square of a strong colour in the middle of the white paper, say a yellow or pink post-it note, or a fluorescent pen is a good one.
3. Now from about 300mm away (1 foot), stare at it for at least 30 seconds, focussing in the middle of the colour and do not let your eyes move away from this spot.
4. After the 30 seconds are up, remove the coloured paper, but continue to stare at the same spot on the white paper.
5. You should see the complimentary colour appear…if it was a yellow post-it, you will see purple, if it were a green post-it, red will appear.
This little exercise is a simple example of how our eyes work with colour…and their capacity to force an adjusted interpretation of the colours we see. The stronger the hue, the harder our eyes (and brains) need to work to do this.
Sadly, HC have done everything wrong here…lime green against black = yes…lime green against white = disaster!
HC, you seriously need to sack your colour consultant…if you even have one…who I feel is simply jumping on the latest fad of using “lime green” for corporate branding, without actually understanding in what context it needs to be applied. Lime greens have been avoided by industry and marketing since year dot…and for very good reason. The recent use by some larger corporate entities has been a very intellectually planned affair, with an educated colour reasoning obviously not shown here. Even so, some of these have not been too successful!
Lime green works only with black…never white…and needs a corresponding psychologically linked colour, such as the sky-blue we see in ANZ’s use of these two colours. They are after the green-grass/blue-skies subliminal message…which in their case works due to the inclusion of the right hue weightings.
What HC have done here is atrocious…and will definitely result in a gradual decline of usage. I already have a headache after just one hour this morning…same thing last night after a similar time spent assessing the site.
I will definitely be spending less time logged on now.
HC need to understand; there is a very strong subliminal inference gained from the green hues…it is the one colour of the spectrum with the greatest number of variations recognisable by the uneducated colour mind. There are only a few greens which evoke a negative response…and yellow/lime green is one of them!
At the very least you need to tone down the saturation by at least 50%...and shift the hue away from the warm (yellow/reds) towards the cold (blues). Problem is the colours will then be more or less the same as T/Stocks, which have about the right colour saturation and hue values if you want to go the green path!
You probably didn’t realise it…but HC had the colour mix perfect in the previous effort…the blue/grey with orange highlights (complimentary colours), were both pleasing to the eye, less stressful, less tiring…and importantly, with the text and general format in grey blues, people’s eyes would have been looking for the opposite colour as a place to “rest” and balance out the offsetting nature of looking at a single hue all day...as was demonstrated in the above exercise. The opposite of the previous blue/grey tones was in fact orange, the colour of the previous HC logo. As such, the result of the previous format was a subconscious search for this colour by those logged on and subsequent subliminal reminder all day long of the HC logo…we of course were mostly unaware of this.
HC have done them selves a real disservice here…and should sack their colour consultant, who clearly just does not get it!
Further, from a “composition” viewpoint, such a strong colour for the site will be a distraction from advertising banners…it is all just too cluttered, with competing elements of strong colour all wanting the attention of our eyes.
As for the functionality of the site…
The number of reads is gone, more clicks are required to do the same things as before and we cannot embed a You Tube clip is seems…with this form of ideas communication taking off around the world, I fear HC is going backwards not facilitating it.
I really do wonder how such decisions are arrived at…it looks to me like a committee and programmer have designed the site…without any reference to someone who actually uses it on a day-to-day basis for posting, etc…which would of course be different to one scanning the site for other purposes, as perhaps the administrators might.
Also, we still cannot search for all the posts by a certain poster on a specific stock…perhaps one of the most useful capacities to add to the search function and one that has been requested numerous times. Further, it is near impossible to see which posts have been read and which have not, with the far too subtle difference between “read” and “non-read” subject text.
We previously saw our favourite posters highlighted in orange…this is no longer the case.
We also cannot see in a thread who is replying to whome…makes comprehension near impossible at time.
Just two good things I can see that can be considered an improvement…
1. Things load faster;
2. The favourites filter is a great idea.
Other than that, I fear I will visit the site less now…if for no other reason than the lime-green format (and green text which is just far too much)…is simply giving me a headache.
Cheers!
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