My new app design flopped because of a green and red pie chart that nobody could read

I spent like 3 weeks on this dashboard for a client in Austin. Everything looked clean, I was proud of it. Then I showed it to a buddy who's colorblind and he just stared at it for a minute. He goes 'man, I have no idea which slice is which.' That's when it hit me. I used green for profits and red for losses. Classic mistake. He couldn't tell them apart at all. I felt like an idiot for not even thinking about it. So now I'm redoing the whole thing with patterns on the slices, like stripes and dots, plus I'm putting actual labels right on the chart instead of just a legend. Has anyone else had a client push back on adding patterns because they think it looks ugly?

2 comments

2 Comments

seth_nguyen13d ago

I had a client once who insisted on using neon orange and bright yellow for their charts. Said it looked "modern." I couldn't look at the screen for more than five seconds without my eyes watering. Sometimes people just get stuck on something and won't budge no matter what you say.

nathanking13d ago

Man, the patterns thing is a trickier balance than people admit. I've done a few dashboards for a food bank in San Antonio and we had to add hatching to their bar charts for accessibility. Some donors straight up said it looked like a ransom note. But here's the thing nobody talks about: you can use the same color but vary the saturation and brightness instead. Like a dark green and a light green with different textures works way better than throwing random stripes on there. Saves the clean look and still fixes the visibility problem.