Picked blue and orange for a dashboard chart and half my users couldn't read it

I was building a project status dashboard at work about 3 months ago and had to pick two colors for the main chart. One was a bright blue and the other was a medium orange. I thought they looked fine, but after rolling it out I got complaints from 4 coworkers saying they looked almost identical. Turns out red-green is common but I didn't realize blue-orange also causes issues for some people with tritanopia. I swapped the orange to a dark purple instead and now it works for everyone. Has anyone else run into unexpected color combos that seemed fine until you heard from actual colorblind users?

2 comments

2 Comments

michaelcoleman10d ago

Purple was the right move honestly (I've done similar swaps myself). Bright green and red is the classic nightmare for about 8% of men, but I found out the hard way that yellow and light green tripped up a few coworkers with deuteranomaly. I started using a tool called Coblis to simulate what my charts look like before I show anyone. Running a quick simulation catches stuff like blue-purple blending together for some people. Then I test with a couple actual users if I can (just ask them to glance at a mockup). It saves a ton of rework compared to fixing it after launch.

mila_jones3910d ago

Using a simulator is definitely better than nothing, but I don't think testing with actual colorblind people is always realistic... sometimes you just don't have coworkers who can look at a mockup. Running a sim catches most of the big problems anyway without having to bother anyone.