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Why does nobody talk about how pattern icons beat colors every time
I used to think adding little symbols next to color coded stuff was overkill, honestly. Like who needs a tiny triangle next to the blue label when the blue is right there, you know? But last month my wife and I were organizing our garage shelves with those colored storage bins from Target, and she grabbed the wrong box three times for her craft stuff because the red and green lids look identical to her. I was like wait, you cannot tell those apart? And she said no, and I realized I had been designing our whole system around colors only. So I spent a Sunday afternoon printing out little icons for each bin, a ball of yarn for fabric, a wrench for tools, that sort of thing. Now she finds things in seconds, no squinting or asking me which one. It made me wonder how many apps or websites I have used that just rely on color for buttons or status indicators. Have any of you switched to shapes or text labels after seeing a colorblind friend struggle, or do you think colors are still fine if the shades are different enough?
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ray21029d ago
How did your wife react when she saw the new labels? I did something like this at work last year when we were sorting files for our small office. We had color coded folders and I kept grabbing the wrong ones because the orange and the yellow looked the same to me under the cheap lights. My boss thought I was just being careless. Once I put a big letter on each tab, A for bills, C for clients, that kind of thing, the mistakes stopped right away. Took me maybe twenty minutes with a marker and now nobody messes it up.
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