Had a client tell me my pie chart was 'just gray blobs' and that stuck with me for months

I was showing a dashboard to a marketing director in Seattle back in 2022. He said he couldn't tell the difference between the green and red sections. I just stared at it for a second. I never even thought about it before that moment. I went home and read about deuteranopia that same night. Now I always use patterns or different shapes alongside color. Has anyone else had a moment where a client just casually dropped some feedback that completely changed how you work?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninam8623d ago

Did you end up adding those patterns to every chart, or just the ones for big presentations?

terry_mitchell23d ago

You asked about "big presentations" specifically, and that's actually where I drew the line. I only added those cross-hatch patterns to the charts that were going to senior leadership or client-facing decks. The internal team dashboards and the weekly status reports just got the standard solid fills. Honestly, it was too much work to go back and update every single chart in our system, and some of them look fine as they are. Did you find that the time you spent on those patterns made a real difference in how people read the data, or was it more of a cosmetic thing?