I have the agree with the developers that this is a Great feature because the user hardly ever notices it, but it greatly improves his experience.
Having the color scheme work with your logo is what they called a hygiene factor in business school- You seldom get any praise or notice for it being there, but you'll LOSE points if the scheme doesn't match..
I think this has to do with the fact that most users tend to worry more about content than design-
Users think "I need a logo", or "I want a photo of my cat".. They aren't thinking about Whitespace, or color choices. They're thinking about content. They're thinking about how to add Foo, not how it will look.
As a application provider (Like so many of us are or want to be) it's our job to abstract design, and let people focus on content, which what they care about in the first place.
If users aren't going to think about design, but they are going to feel bad if you don't have it, they you have three choices-
1) Ignore the problem. This is what MySpace and GeoCities do- They let the user upload whatever they want, no matter how it might look. The users focus on content rather on the looks. They'll complain about it, and you'll "lose points" with them, but they get to have all the widgets they want.
2) Force most users to display it your way, or have experts modify it. This is what WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS do. The default templates look decent, and editing them is hard for mere mortals, requiring HTML or Scripting. Creating new templates may be technically possible, but beyond the scope of most users
3) Make the user's content look GOOD. This is what Wufoo does with forms, and Apple's iWeb does for webpages. It lets you add the content, but it adds its own design special-sauce. This is the model that we should be shooting for for our Web Apps. How can we make the User's content look good?
A logo could also be made the basis for a fun color-picker: display the logo as a palette on which to click an eye-dropper to select each of the theme colors. Hell, animate the page look in real time as the user hovers (psychedelic!), lock-in their choice on click.
It might also be helpful to provide a version of the logo with pixels regrouped to make all like-pixels contiguous -- easier targetting of disperse colors. Order groups by brightness, saturation, frequency (a congruent histogram?), whatever's most pretty in practice.
(If you use this idea in your startup, invite me over for lunch someday.)
If this took them a short amount of time then it's clearly worth the effort. If they spent a lot of time then it seems frivolous and makes me think they may be avoiding working on the mundane issues that clients would find truly useful.
Making boring work more interesting can produce amazing results but it can also be a huge distraction. Either way this is definitely clever and the concept is probably applicable to all sorts of other features.
P.S.
I still think DabbleDB needs to seriously consider Joe Kraus's reasoning for why he "positioned JotSpot as a Wiki company". Because I think this "web database" concept is suicidal.
I say it's suicidal because they're trying to create a completely new market for something called "web databases". Kraus talks about the virtues of riding waves rather than trying to create them, and I think DabbleDB could really utilize that advice right now.
The way they position themselves will influence the way the press covers them and customers view them. It might be the difference between mediocre and meteoric sales.
You know what's cool about this is that they didn't just hand it off to the designer and say, "go manually pick some colors". They actually thought about a programmatic approach they could take. It seems like they had some good knowledge of colors and the way computer draw colors, but they still weren't graphic designers themselves.
Having the color scheme work with your logo is what they called a hygiene factor in business school- You seldom get any praise or notice for it being there, but you'll LOSE points if the scheme doesn't match..
I think this has to do with the fact that most users tend to worry more about content than design-
Users think "I need a logo", or "I want a photo of my cat".. They aren't thinking about Whitespace, or color choices. They're thinking about content. They're thinking about how to add Foo, not how it will look.
As a application provider (Like so many of us are or want to be) it's our job to abstract design, and let people focus on content, which what they care about in the first place.
If users aren't going to think about design, but they are going to feel bad if you don't have it, they you have three choices-
1) Ignore the problem. This is what MySpace and GeoCities do- They let the user upload whatever they want, no matter how it might look. The users focus on content rather on the looks. They'll complain about it, and you'll "lose points" with them, but they get to have all the widgets they want.
2) Force most users to display it your way, or have experts modify it. This is what WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS do. The default templates look decent, and editing them is hard for mere mortals, requiring HTML or Scripting. Creating new templates may be technically possible, but beyond the scope of most users
3) Make the user's content look GOOD. This is what Wufoo does with forms, and Apple's iWeb does for webpages. It lets you add the content, but it adds its own design special-sauce. This is the model that we should be shooting for for our Web Apps. How can we make the User's content look good?