Overheard a web dev at a coffee shop in Austin say 'I just use red/green for everything' and had to bite my tongue

They were showing their mockup to a friend and I noticed the form validation used pure red borders for errors and pure green for success, which probably locks out like 300 million people (you know, deuteranopia folks), so I'm wondering how many of you actually test your designs with a simulator before shipping them or do you just assume the color contrast is fine?

2 comments

2 Comments

thomas_johnson3524d ago

Have you ever noticed how many restaurants use red and green on their menus too? I swear half the places I go to have green for 'healthy' items and red for 'spicy' or 'chef's special' and it just blends together after a while. That web dev thing is common, I see it all the time in dashboards at work where people use red for bad and green for good without thinking about the 8 percent of men who can't tell them apart. In my experience, most folks just grab colors that look good to them and call it a day. They don't mean any harm but it's like not checking your blind spots before changing lanes. A quick run through a simulator takes like two minutes, your mileage may vary but I think it's one of those small things that really adds up.

the_ben24d ago

oh wait hold on, eight percent? i honestly had no idea it was that high. i knew red green colorblindness was a thing for guys but i thought it was like maybe 2 or 3 percent max. that's wild, like 1 in 12 men just can't see those two colors the same way? and yeah you're totally right about restaurants too, i never even thought about that. i've definitely been in places where the whole menu is just red and green and everything starts looking the same. it's crazy how many things we design without even thinking about who's going to use them. like you said, it's not malicious, it's just lazy. but 8 percent is way too big a number to just ignore.