My colorblind friend couldn't read my favorite dashboard design

Last month I was showing off this data dashboard I'd built for work to my buddy Mark at a coffee shop in Sacramento. He's red-green colorblind and I knew that, but I used red and green bars to show profit vs loss. He just stared at it for like 10 seconds and said "uh, which ones are the bad ones?" lol. I felt like an idiot. The green and red looked almost identical to him. I immediately pulled out my laptop and added little icons next to the bars - a checkmark for positive and an X for negative. Also changed the shapes to be slightly different thicknesses. He could read it fine after that. Has anyone else had a moment where your color choices completely failed on someone?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_murray889d ago

I heard some stat like 1 in 12 men have some form of colorblindness, so it's way more common than people think. Small changes like icons or patterns make a huge difference.

shah.evan9d ago

Ha @kevin_murray88, I'm probably the 1 in 12 who still can't tell which sock is which!