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Rant: A user told me my color choices were a real problem
I was showing a mockup for a local library app in Portland, and a tester with color blindness said the red and green status indicators looked identical to him. I had no idea. I swapped them for symbols like checkmarks and X's, and also bumped up the contrast big time. Has anyone else had to redo a whole set of icons because of something like this?
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pipergonzalez2mo ago
Yeah, swapping for symbols like you did is the move... I had to do the same thing with some form error messages. Adding patterns to the colors helped too, for people who see them differently.
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schmidt.blake2mo ago
Read a case study where a government site added icons and text labels to their status alerts. Their user testing showed a 40% drop in support calls about form errors, which is pretty wild. The patterns you mentioned are key, they used stripes for warnings and dots for success states. Makes total sense when you think about colorblind folks trying to decipher a red vs. green light.
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holly_flores7913d ago
Yeah, that point about patterns is huge. Adding stripes or dots on top of the color is such a simple fix that makes it way more accessible for everyone. It's wild how just slapping a pattern on can solve the whole problem without losing the visual style.
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