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My heatmap chart was trash for years and a guy named Dave from Calgary finally showed me why
Honestly I have been building dashboards for close to 9 years and I always used the classic red to green heatmap because it looked sharp on my monitor. Last Thursday a guy named Dave from Calgary hopped on a call about our warehouse tool and told me flat out he could not read half the cells, he has deuteranopia and red and green just melt into one brown mess for him. I felt like such a jerk because I had never once tested it past a contrast checker. The fix was stupid simple, I swapped to a blue to orange scale plus a tiny arrow in each cell pointing up or down, and suddenly he could scan the grid in about 5 seconds instead of squinting at it. I ran the same change across 14 reports and got zero complaints for the first time ever. Small win but it felt huge. If you build charts for work, do you lean on position and text labels too, or is there a color scale you trust more than others?
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gavinwood7d ago
Blue to orange plus arrows is the right call, position beats color every time. Diverging scales like that are my go-to now, I stopped trusting red-green years ago.
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