Letting users customize the default background on PMC homescreen (Was: Re: Ideas Critical to PMC)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Tuesday 25 February 2014 10:48:47 Shantanu Tushar Jha wrote:
> Hi Harshit,
> 
> First of all, just a note, whenever you have a new thing to discuss, it is
> a bad idea to reply to an existing thread which is not directly related
> (this is popularly known as hacking others' threads :P)
> 
> To the topic, I personally don't think it is a good idea to let the user
> change the background of the media center. The rationale behind this is
> that the background is part of our UI so changing it can lead to visual
> inconsistency.
> 
> I'll love to hear from others' views on this, especially our Usability
> folks.

Hi Harshit, hi Shantanu,
from a usability perspective, changing the background of a UI isn't a no-go, 
but it has to be handled with care. The most important thing is that to avoid 
bad contrast, every other element of the UI has to have a standard-color 
background on top of the user-selected background. 
You'd have to try that out (black background behind every UI element, probably 
with a few pixels around the actual element) and see whether it
a) looks good
b) leaves enough of the background visible to make sense at all

I agree with Shantanu that without background behind the other elements, we 
could end up with unreadable, unrecognizable or completely invisible elements 
with the wrong background.

CC'ing Jens to hear what he may have to say from a design perspective.

Cheers,
Thomas