usability & critical human factors, making sure everyone can see your design

[martyr]

well, a good bout of webdesign, an old textbook, and Pyrotechnic have reminded me of something we overlook in design and techinal art all too often... human factors.

they don't come up as often in web stuff because you don't see much machine-human interaction, that's mostly up to the user's io devices.

but something i know i've overlooked more than once, and certainly a few times recently, is my large color-deficient audience.

my original version of the syndicate, for example, used a steel-green page with white, very light grey, and black text colors.

a couple days later i got a forwarded email from planetsidestats, a subsidary of pss, from a green-deficient user who couldn't read any of the grey or white text. We switched both sites to black text right away, of course - nobody had thought of that.

afterwards, i got out my human factors book and read the vision chapter again.

a lot of things jumped out at me in doing so.

my new personal ruleset for informative text, based on human factors research, looks like this:

Dark lettering on light backgrounds
Always use mixed or all-lower capitalization (never caps)
Adjust font size for target age - larger for older. Minimum 10, max 18 for younger eyes
Accomodate for luminosity, not just contrast
In evaluating contrast, adjust for color deficiency.

that brings me to the feature, of course:

seven of every 100 males are color-deficient.

the most common types are green and red:


if you're unfamiliar, the way it works is that your viewer is simply unable to discern the color from the parallel shade of grey.

for example (from my book) a red-deficient worker was unable to find a fire alarm pullswitch that was placed on a grey wall of the same (achromatic) brightness.

another example, in the case of games, is that the identification of enemies.

the classic red and blue combination, as you can see by the chart, is least likely to cause difficulty, as blue deficiencies are rare and red deficiencies represent just over a quarter of the total.

in planetside, the armors have dramatically different profiles, and the vehicles, while the models may be the same, change not just the paint colors, but the dark/light patterns as well.


taking cues from that, you want to design primarily in monochrome, then add color to the product for polish. you don't want the user to have to rely on color to get information.

so use symbols, dark-on-light text, placeholders, and good contrast when assembling things. it's dissapointing to have your art all done then realize 7% of your audience can't understand it, trust me.

[bwzman]

Thx for the info and a good read, martyr.

By the way I have heard of some people who can not discern Vanu vehicles from Terran, but they may be lying...

[Pyrotechnic]

W00t <<< special .

I picked TR because of the colour, I couldn't tell the difference between the blue and purple on the map, so I figured, if it wasn't red is was enemy .

I'm not too bad, I'm not allowed to land a plane in bad weather as I can't tell the difference between the red and green landing lights but apparently I can see through camoflauge . It's mostly blue and purple, purple and pink, red and green, red and brown, yellow and green and shades of colour (IE, I can tell light yellow from dark yellow, but not the finer shades inbetween) so most colours really .