Playing with myself (not what you're thinking)

After thinking a lot about it, I though that it would be fair enough to do the first usability analysis on my own website. So let's get our hands on the job.
Let me explain how this is gonna work:
- I will choose just one aspect of any website to put under the lens of usability.
- I will put a screen shot of the page, with some indications (maybe I'll vandalize it a little with arrows, circle marks, and occasionally some mustache) about what's going on and why something on the website doesn't work according to the usability criteria.
- At the end I will put some comments about how the feature, script, layout, whatever it may be, can work better or be simplified.
The analysis is made according to a list of usability criteria that was compiled by the EAI group (Ergonomics Applied to Informatics) with whom I gladly worked a few years ago. In the future I'll translate the list and post in my blog. Nonetheless you can find more information about usability guidelines at www.usability.gov .
So, let's take the first thing I discovered in my website that I think might be slightly in disaccord with the usability criteria called "learnability": the colors of the categories.



In the indication, I realize that the colors I choose don't play along with the expected logic of "matching colors" as they should, cause the green color is the dominant color. If you click on any link from the "Recent Entries" (yellow), the web site will display the topic with a green marker, and normally you expect some yellow elements in the page, which doesn't happen. Yeah, green is my favor color.

Should I change this feature or not?
Well, as I am the owner and the designer of this website, and because I like colors, I say no. Now, if the website isn't simple, or have much more levels and have high information density, probably, this could turn into a problem. In fact, in the accessibility guide lines made by our friendly neighborhood W3C, says to not rely information only on colors. Nonetheless, in this particular case, solving the colors issue is not reeeeally a big problem like global warming or Godzilla.


Stick around!