501897 - Search bar should not be orange

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(support.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Ernst de Haan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; nl; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090612 Firefox/3.5
Build Identifier: 

There is a search bar at the support front page:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/

The image used as a background is:
http://support.mozilla.com/styles/mozcommon/searchbar.png

That image has an orange color, which is in my opinion not the best choice, because of the associations the color has:
1. traffic lights show orange to indicate a certain level of danger ("do not continue, unless..." or "almost")
2. this color is also used for non-final Firefox downloads (betas, release candidates) - in fact the download button for those looks very similar to this background.

My guess is that it makes people think: "wait up, am I being warned for something? is there a consequence of using this search bar I should be aware of?" - at least this is what happened to me.

Instead people should feel comfortable with the color immediately. I propose changing the color to for example blue or green.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Sounds like an A/B test would be useful!

Comment 2

[David Tenser [:djst]]

The point is to draw people's attention to the box. It is not orange, it is a pale, yellow/white gradient -- far from the strong orange used on the beta/RC download buttons.

A few counter-examples of your cases why orange (yellow) isn't suitable:

- Yellow is often used to highlight or emphasize parts in texts because it draws people's attention.
- While colors can often send subliminal messages directly to the automatic system, the text in the search box will speak to your reflective system. In this case, the text ("Search the Knowledge Base") is clearly not communicating danger.

Considering our limited resources and the time it takes to prepare an A/B test, I think we're better off WONTFIXing this.

Comment 3

[Ernst de Haan]

Perfectly fine by me. I was just passing on my personal experience.

Comment 4

[David Tenser [:djst]]

I appreciate it. Keep your thoughts coming!

Comment 5

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

While I appreciate your arguments, David, a recent test on the Firefox download page http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06/19/firefox-is-green/ showed that a green download button performed best, while an orange button, practically identical to sumo's search, performed the worst.

We're actively trying to get more users to search, and we have data that shows our color choice might not be best. In fact if using a green search box is the same improvement for us as it is for the download button it would be a bigger win than implementing the changes from the previous A/B test that reworked almost every part of page.