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My colorblind uncle said my "safe" traffic light chart was the worst one yet
My uncle Dale is red-green colorblind and last week at his place in Boise I showed him a dashboard I built with green, yellow, and red status dots. I figured red and green were fine because they sit at opposite ends of the light. He laughed and said the red and green dots looked like the same murky brown to him, it was the yellow one he could actually spot. So I swapped the dots for shapes, a check, a triangle, and an X, and he read the whole thing in about 5 seconds. Has anyone else had a relative call out a design you were proud of, and what did you change after?
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wendy_clark4h ago
Little stuff like this shows up everywhere once you start looking. My dad can't tell the difference between the blue and green lines on a weather map, and my mom has trouble with those tiny gray "disabled" labels on some websites. We design everything around what looks nice to us, then act shocked when half the people around us can't read it. A friend of mine missed his stop once because the bus sign used red and green text to mean two different routes. Shapes and words just work better than color for a lot of folks, and honestly the dashboards end up clearer for everyone.
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