Survey from HackerNCoder: Colors in QubesOS

[hackerncoder]

I have created a survey about colors in Qubes, to help understand users:
Are there too many colors? Too few? What do users associate with the
colors? what are they used for?

Please don’t let the second page scare you away! The first one contains
many questions which also give very valuable information to me/us.

https://survey.encryptionin.space/index.php?r=survey/index&sid=178339&lang=en

(It is hosted by (and created by) me)

There is also the following issue in qubes-issues for feedback and
findings: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/6463

--
Please don't send me proprietary formats.

[tetra...@danwin1210.me]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:16:04PM +0000, hackerncoder wrote:
>I have created a survey about colors in Qubes, to help understand
>users: Are there too many colors? Too few? What do users associate with
>the colors? what are they used for?

There wasn't any space in the survey for general comments, so let me say
here: more colors, please! I find it makes the most sense to be able to
isolate *both* by threat level and theme, and there simply aren't enough
colors to do that.

Colors are not just about preventing one VM from pretending to be
another VM.

Colors also really help prevent *user error*, where you accidentally
confuse e.g your chat window with Mom with the chat window you use for
communicating with journalistic sources -- and end up asking Mom to get
undercover footage from North Korea. Woops!

[hackerncoder]

On 3/16/21 6:48 PM, tetrahedra via qubes-users wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:16:04PM +0000, hackerncoder wrote:
>> I have created a survey about colors in Qubes, to help understand
>> users: Are there too many colors? Too few? What do users associate
>> with the colors? what are they used for?
>
> There wasn't any space in the survey for general comments, so let me say
> here: more colors, please!

Well.. Yes, that is one of the things this study is trying to figure
out. If people want more or less or what.

> I find it makes the most sense to be able to
> isolate *both* by threat level and theme, and there simply aren't enough
> colors to do that.

I can say (which I really shouldn't, but I just cannot not do it,
because... yes. Anyways, there is a month until this survey ends, it can
very well change from what I am about to write) that most others agree
that there are too few colors.

> Colors are not just about preventing one VM from pretending to be
> another VM.
>
> Colors also really help prevent *user error*, where you accidentally
> confuse e.g your chat window with Mom with the chat window you use for
> communicating with journalistic sources -- and end up asking Mom to get
> undercover footage from North Korea. Woops!
>

I'll note that one down.

HackerNCoder

[Ulrich Windl]

On 3/16/21 7:48 PM, tetrahedra via qubes-users wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 10:16:04PM +0000, hackerncoder wrote:
>> I have created a survey about colors in Qubes, to help understand
>> users: Are there too many colors? Too few? What do users associate
>> with the colors? what are they used for?
>
> There wasn't any space in the survey for general comments, so let me say
> here: more colors, please! I find it makes the most sense to be able to
> isolate *both* by threat level and theme, and there simply aren't enough
> colors to do that.

16 million? ;-)
I think most people get confused with many colors to user interface
elements (and the windows titles are user interface elements)

I think 8 is a good number, but even with eight the visual contrast is
not equally spaced: blue/purple/black are quite close

There's an interesting tool, BTW (see attachment):
https://color.adobe.com/create/color-accessibility

However it only suports four colors, and it doesn't (yet) display the
visual contrast...