Samarskaya for Product Chatters

A Conversation on “Going Grayscale” (Winter 2017)

Faruk Ateş: Hi Ksenya! For the readers, can you tell us briefly a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Ksenya Samarskaya: Start with the most difficult question why don’t you!

Haha.

I’m a creative practitioner. It’s splintered into a branding studio where we focus on highly honed visual communications, and a type foundry where we design and create our own typefaces.

I’ll have a million follow-up questions about that, but for now I want to focus on today’s topic: your iPhone. You showed it to me when we were having dinner the other day, and it piqued my interest right away: your phone is set to Grayscale mode, OS-wide. Why did you do that?

Going Grayscale: How it Starts, and Initial Observations

Initially, who knows… I tend to try and test all the things. It’s like when you enter a new room, you putz with all the light switches to determine how you like it best. But then, there’re all the cascading reasons why I’ve kept it that way. I’ve now turned my laptop into a grayscale machine as well, so am chatting with you via that screen.

A grayscale iPhone screen is significantly more interesting to me than what apps people have on their home screen: there is usually a very specific, meaningful reason behind that kind of decision, going beyond mere “I use this most frequently” or “I like this best” (like when people organize their apps by icon color and hue).

Just like their book libraries, yeahs, have seen that (color coordinating) often.

Funny you mention book libraries: in my home, our book collection is indeed rainbow-sorted, and grouped by owner.

That must be some kind of an in-group nod, right?

Ha, what, a couple of bisexuals living in San Francisco? That’s more a vigorous headshake than a nod.

Hah, I’m into that.

My books are actually turned spine in and stacked horizontally, but we can get to that aberration at another time.

What are some of the cascading reasons you discovered after “going grayscale” on your phone and, now as well, your laptop?

So for the iPhone… I try to be really conscientious about how my attention is split and where it’s focused. I noticed that grayscale did a couple of things for me that I really appreciated.

One, those little number alerts. They’re meant to stress you out. They’re red. They’re high contrast. And the entire functioning behind them is to gamify your behavior and for you to feel unsettled until you’re at inbox-zero, voicemail-zero, rando-app-zero. I was a slave to them before. I’d reach for my phone to send a message or check the weather, but then they’d be sitting down there just shouting at me.

Right, their purpose is entirely to get your attention, make you tap on them to see what’s “new”; to clear out what they represent so that you’re “up to date” — even though, in the context of notification badges, those terms are not really meaningful.

Exactly! Yet in grayscale, all of a sudden, they’re just tiny little numbers. They’ve lost their shout.

It’s a similar issue of attention division when I’m inside other apps. I use my phone for reading a lot. Links from social networks, saved items; I’m constantly bouncing around. I think I was on an Atlantic page the other day, and there’s this color banner that hovers and follows with you as you scroll down and try to Pac-Man up more of the words. When in full color… it’s high contrast, bright… Colors definitely take precedent over text.

Faruk: It sounds like an Orwellian nightmare of a reading experience, to be honest.

Right. It’s a battle. You versus the advertisers.

In grayscale, all of a sudden, the text is back to being the higher contrast, more important item on the page. My attention is back where I want it to be.

That battle is always going to exist for as long as advertising revenue is the top incentive driving the publishing of content, though. Except you’ve found a loophole for your own experience to be better.

Yeah. Maybe we shouldn’t publish this? Too many people catch on and they’ll start adding quacking noises into the experiences to make sure to pull your attention back.

I don’t think “going grayscale” will be the hot new trend for 2017 to the point where advertisers will worry, but we can hope. My article reading has been sorely lacking in regular quacking.

So you’ve tried going grayscale on your phone since the dinner as well. What’ve you noticed?

Well for one, it’s disincentivized me from playing my two little distraction games, which I’m appreciative of.

Right, you mentioned you were worried about how those would come across.

For another, I’ve found that my main writing app (Scrivener) is already completely in grayscale. I spent some time perusing Instagram and found that, like you said at the dinner, most of the photos actually looked better and more interesting this way. For the very select few where color clearly mattered, the quick toggle and back sufficed.

I noticed I would toggle occasionally when I first went grayscale. After a while it subsided, to me almost never needing it now.

Instagram, a purely photo-driven interface, works great in grayscale. Writing, same. Reading, yep. It’s really only the games where I feel the experience is lessened, so far. When I use Messages and quickly toggle colors on, I’m usually shocked by how vividly bright the blue of the message bubbles is. It’s like a color explosion overwhelming me.

I loooooved Instagram in grayscale. It actually upped my engagement for a while. All those mediocre photos were a bit less mediocre. All those harshly contrasting follow-ups were now smooth transitions.

When Designer’s Don’t Consider Accessibility: The Grayscale Version

In some cases, there’s a difficult balance between visually pleasing colors and useful, functional contrasts. Charts and graphs, which I work with daily at the moment, can often look much more relaxing and pleasant when monochromatic, but their purpose and utility is rapidly lost under those conditions.

Rapidly lost? Charts and graphs have existed in black and white newspapers and textbooks for a long, long time.

I did notice this summer that a lot of political maps would turn to an even gray on my phone, where they’d be read and blue on colored screens. Normally, designers would want to go with varying contrasts, but perhaps they were choosing the exact same value as a show of neutrality?

An actual understanding of neutrality is not something I often ascribe to anyone working in politics…

Or… grayscale phones are a grand unifying symbol to bring the country back together now.

Okay, I’m reading too much into this symbology. It really was the only thing I’ve found where there was completely no difference in the hue values. Zero. One whole same wash.

It’s also possible that the designers of those political maps were consciously only shifting the hue, so as to avoid people misreading any meaning in their chosen saturation or brightness. And as a result, the grayscale version would be largely identical.

Right right — that’s what I was wondering earlier, the show of neutrality. The fact that it was identical, and it was large publications, makes me think that someone on the other end was considering this.

Yes, I would suspect so. Often, when they did them in black and white, they used various patterns to differentiate segments from one another. Dotted, horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonal lines, etc. Patterns and not relying on color alone are, once again, the key to being accessible. But I digress…

So agree. Let’s bring back patterns!

Conscientious Design for Human Interfaces

It’s all things that the brain needs to process. I’m sure there has to be some interesting science on this if we dig around.

Right, the cognitive load of processing colors.

Do you think we’re experiencing a digital environment that is too cognitively taxing for (most) people?

I’ve spent my entire life in the visual arts. I’ve sensitized myself. I’ve attached words to the slight variations I was noticing, cementing them further. In some ways, I’m probably a canary in the coal-mine.

Tantek Çelik wrote about the cognitive load in human interface design ten years ago. Not only is it still relevant reading, but I think there’s a case to be made for being much, much more conscious — as product and interface designers — of the cognitive load users are dealing with in a general sense, from their computing device environment itself.

If I look at my laptop screen right now, I’m overwhelmed by the row of website icons in my Chrome window that’s visible behind this Skype window. They are by far the dominant colors on my screen as a whole, and yet they are of least importance to me right now.

Intentionality, and conscientiousness. I think a lot of design today is not very conscientious towards the end user. Or, put more simply, just not very considerate.

It’s the way I work as a designer, and it’s the way I navigate as a user. I’m constantly asking, “What’s the value I want to get out of this? What’s the goal and intent of my action?”

Then for everything around it, is it helping me? Is it a need? Is it part of the core functionality? Does it add value? Does it add pleasure? It’s a reductive way of working. If it’s not adding something to my life, it goes away.

What are some ways in which the grayscale experience has affected your thinking about that?

Color wasn’t adding anything valuable to the interactions I had on my phone (texting, reading, checking stats), or the actions I was employing on my laptop (reading, writing, drawing type). I still have color on my iMac, as I do a lot more photo-processing on there, or movie watching.

It sounds like it’s safe to say the grayscale experience (experiment?) has made you more conscious about your use of color when designing. Have you found yourself consciously, or perhaps subconsciously, changing your approach to design to better accommodate this?

Oh, now see… this is where my anti-color bias might show its face. I’ve been avoiding color in my design for a long time now. I use black and white, with a single accent color, in almost all of my designs.

When working with students or junior designers, I always have them design in grayscale first to make sure the concept and the forms work before they’re allowed to bring any color in.

Color is tantalizing. It’s like candy. You can get caught up picking out all the flavors and very easily forget what the original intention was.

So my thing is just always intentionality. Is this color adding value? Is it drawing attention to where you want the attention to be, or is it pulling the attention away? And, what is the audience there for? Are they there for utilitarian purposes, or distraction purposes?

For now, I think we’ve covered and explored a lot of interesting aspects. I’ll spend more time “going grayscale” and see how I like (and dislike?) the experience.

Any closing thoughts?

Don’t judge the food photos on Yelp reviews too harshly. That’s the one thing I’ve found doesn’t translate to monochrome at all, losing any appetizing qualities in the process.

Sound advice. Thank you for your time and insights, Ksenya! I’m looking forward to our next conversation, presumably we’ll tackle world hunger vs. iconography.

Hah! Transgender polar bears vs. appropriate line height on resumés.

The possibilities are endless. ‘Till the next time!

How to Set Your iOS Device to Grayscale and Enable Quick Toggle

In the Settings app, go to General > Accessibility. Find “Display Accommodations” > Color Filters, and there you can toggle Color Filters on (and pick which type to use — Grayscale in our case):

To enable the quick toggle of a triple click on the Home button, which will let you switch back and forth from Grayscale to color, go back to the Accessibility screen, scroll to the very bottom and find “Accessibility Shortcut”. Set that to “Color Filters” and you’re done!

Originally published in 2017 by Faruk Ateş on Product Matters. Edited down for the current version.