I used colorblind simulation on my dashboard design and it was a mess

Last Thursday I finished a dashboard for a small client in Austin and decided to run it through a colorblind simulator on a whim. Every single data point I had color coded just blended into a brownish gray blob. Turns out I used red and green bars next to each other, classic rookie mistake. I had to go back and add patterns to each bar plus change one of the colors to blue. The client actually thanked me for making it readable for their team lead who has deuteranopia. Has anyone else had a similar wake up call with a tool like Coblis or something similar?

2 comments

2 Comments

robinl909d ago

Wait, is colorblind simulation really that useful though? I mean how many people actually have trouble with this stuff compared to the time you waste designing for edge cases? You completely changed your whole dashboard layout over one guy with a specific condition. I feel like you can go down a rabbit hole trying to make everything accessible to every tiny group and end up with a boring, ugly product that works for nobody. Patterns on bars just look messy in my opinion (and I bet that client would have been fine if you just picked better reds and greens).

the_eric9d ago

I had a project last year where I spent THREE DAYS reworking an entire dashboard layout because one guy on the team had deuteranopia. Me and the lead designer were like "just pick better reds and greens" and it worked fine until the VP of product saw the test results and forced us to add these huge diagonal stripes on all the bar charts. It looked TERRIBLE. The final product had these messy crosshatch patterns everywhere and users actually complained it was harder to read than the original. We wasted weeks of dev time for what ended up being a worse experience for everyone. Sometimes you just gotta admit 95% of people see the colors fine and move on.