Showerthought: My old company's dashboard was a guessing game until we added icons

Honestly, our old status dashboard just used red, yellow, and green circles for system health. I'm red-green colorblind and had to ask coworkers what was up half the time. Last quarter, we swapped the circles for a checkmark, exclamation point, and X icon next to the colors. Ngl, the difference was night and day, I can actually do my job now without help. Has anyone else found that adding simple shapes is the most effective fix for color-coded alerts?

2 comments

2 Comments

noah_black19h ago

Oh man, that's such a huge win. We had the same red/green circle problem on a client report, and adding a simple check or "X" next to the color fixed it instantly. It's one of those things that seems obvious after the fact, but so many teams just don't think about it. Honestly, it helps everyone, not just people who are colorblind, because it makes the status way clearer at a quick glance.

amy_reed7919h ago

Yeah, we started adding text labels to all our dashboard icons... makes it way easier to scan reports during meetings.