I was at the Picture People in the mall the other day getting some pictures taken. After we trod through the photography session with our Sunday best on, we sat down at the computer to see the shots. This year we also decided to get Christmas cards. With these cards, you always get to put a little message on each card. They allow you to choose all the gory details of the text including the font, style and color… and that’s where things get interesting.

Above our personalized text, there was “Merry Christmas” in a cursive font and an orangeish goldish color. Our photographer suggested that we use the same color for our message and proceeded to pick the color:

However, our photographer either didn’t know the exact RGB values of the color or didn’t have an advanced talent for matching colors, since we sat there trying to match the stupid color for about 10 minutes… “A little more orange”. “No that’s too orange.” “Maybe if we change the brightness.”

What it really needed was a custom dialog that allowed the user to pick from the common colors used in the cards. Or better yet, a color picker tool to simply click on the color of the text to auto-select it for the foreground color. Either way, the generic color picker dialog was simply too advanced and provided too many choices for the application. Sure it’s nice to be able to pick any color, but what’s the help in being able to pick any color if you aren’t able to pick the exact color you need?

Another example is the common file dialog. This allows you to open and save files to and from any folder. However, if you need to limit the available folders to save to or if you know that the files will always be in a specific folder, then using this dialog is overkill. Write your own dialog and simplify that step for the user. I almost always know where the file I want is located, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked over the shoulder of a friend or relative and I see them struggling to browse to the right location and find exactly where they put the file they want. How many users ever save anything to any location other than the desktop, My Documents, or an external drive anyway?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s often right to just use the common control as is. You don’t want to customize every combo box you have, but you need to be able to identify when usability demands using a custom control. We almost abandoned the whole Christmas card thing, because of this stupid dialog. The difficulty in picking the color almost lost them the sale. So is the simplicity of using a common dialog really worth the risk?