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Overheard a designer say colorblind users probably don't visit their site
Was at a coffee shop in Austin last Thursday and heard two designers talking about a new dashboard they made. One of them literally said 'I mean, how many colorblind people are even going to use this?' and the other laughed. It made my blood run cold honestly. That dashboard probably uses red/green indicators without any patterns or text labels. If you're building anything with status alerts or data charts, please add icons or patterns alongside the colors. Has anyone else run into this kind of dismissive attitude from colleagues?
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miller.paul2mo ago
Man, my buddy runs a small analytics shop and he told me they shipped a dashboard with green/red dots for "good" and "bad" metrics. A week later their biggest client emailed saying half their team couldn't tell which clients were in trouble because the dots all looked the same shade of brown. They had to scramble and add little checkmark and X icons over a weekend patch.
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river_wright2mo ago
Wait, 24% of men? That's way higher than I ever guessed.
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grace9262mo ago
24% of men have some form of colorblindness, that's like one in four dudes. I get that it's not great they said it out loud but honestly most people just forget about it until someone brings it up. The dashboard probably works fine for the majority of users and adding patterns everywhere can make things look cluttered. Plus if someone's that colorblind they probably already have their own browser settings or screen filters to deal with it.
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