Visible difference; Kickers coloured tags

With the weather turning colder and wetter the time has come to stop my relentless wearing of canvas All Stars, which are becoming miserably uncomfortable, in favour of more robust footwear.

^ colour coded shoes

I wouldn’t particularly associate myself with the Kicker brand - conjuring up past images of bloated sandy coloured lumberjack boots - but times have changed and with it so has Kicker shoe design, so I resolved to deal with my foreign-legion-tree-feller-dread somewhat appeased by the quirky green and red, right-shoe-left-shoe tags.

It made me wonder was I being lured in by a cute design touch, or did those tags have a latent use?

Affordance

Don Norman talks about providing affordances in design to assist the user in understanding what the intended use for a control is. For example, the handle on a door should communicate that it is to be pulled, pushed or turned.

Nonchalantly i’ve quietly attributed these tags as not purely cosmetic but also so the wearer is able to pick the correct shoe with greater ease.

I attempted to approach the task afresh, however after years of shoe wearing it is now second nature and the small colour tags did not ping out as being additionally helpful, rather it is the form profile that is the primary indicator.  If the wearer however were new to putting on shoes, such as a child, this could be really helpful and playfully fun.

When thought about from the point-of-view of software this addresses a very real and difficult problem to design for: different user abilities. On one side you have beginners/first timers. The system has to be easy to understand whilst bringing sufficient reward and pleasure for them to persist. On the other are Tron-esque advanced users. They relish things like shortcut keys and personally configuring settings. How you satisfy all these different requirements and whether in fact you should is a question that needs to be asked at the beginning of any design process. I like the idea that Kickers spent time thinking about this.

It made me think about my headphones which i routinely put on the wrong way round. These do not have sufficiently described affordances - the left side is a mirror of the right except for a sunken “L” or “R” character - which makes it easy for me to mistakenly reverse the stereo. Would some kind of colour coding help me here?

Following the Kicker approach, i attached a green and red sticker to alternate sides. It turns out this didn’t really help as i couldn’t see the colour when the ‘phones where lying flat on the desk.

^ Close but no cigar

A more prominent tag would be more useful however it still didn’t seem to be heading in the direction of ultimate win. By using two colours I was needing to remember whether it was green or red that meant left or right. Not a big deal but a redundant conditional process. The second colour was effectively adding noise to the solution not reducing it. Sennheiser’s HD 25-1 II have it got it right on this front. A single red highlight tells me all i need to know.

^ Highlight on one side only

The choice of colours for the tabs is also worth note. If the tabs were conceived for helping to pick out the left and right then wearers with deuteranopia - a common form of colour blindness, where red and green become inseparable - would be scuppered. Helpfulness nil points.

They don’t match?

The inherent value of these simple tags was amusingly brought to life when the shop assistant told me about a customer insisting on a new pair from the store room with the same colour tag on both shoes. To him colour was confusing with no supplementary useful attributes. She didn’t say which colour he wanted.

What were the real motivations behind the Kicker colour tags? Or what do you speculate they are for?