Swapped red/green buttons for shapes with labels and our error rate dropped by half

I run a small team that builds internal tools for a warehouse in Phoenix. For months we had this form where the 'save' button was green and 'cancel' was red. Looked fine to me. Then one of our pickers named Marcus told me he kept hitting the wrong one because both looked grayish to him. He's colorblind. I felt dumb. Last week I replaced all colored buttons with a little disk icon for save and an X for cancel, plus just wrote the words out in plain text. Our error log for that form went from about 12 mistakes a day down to 5 or 6. That was just one change. Anyone else noticed a big difference from ditching color-only cues for something more concrete?

2 comments

2 Comments

nathang6717d ago

12 mistakes a day sounds rough but I mean how critical are those forms anyway? If it's just internal warehouse stuff missing a save click probably just means retyping a few fields. Maybe the buttons were just bad design all around and the shapes helped everyone not just colorblind folks.

riley59517d ago

12 items per day is barely anything in a busy warehouse where people already type over stuff constantly. I've seen guys just hit enter and keep moving, not even checking if the form saved. Honestly, if a shape change cut errors from 15 down to 3, that's not life changing, it's just a small tweak to a routine workflow. Is anyone actually getting fired over a couple of missing button clicks?