Dangerous use of colour
Far be it from me to suggest that websites should not be colourful or indeed aesthetically pleasing (or "pretty" if you prefer), but I cannot help but notice the dangers of ignoring colour blindness. Without any wish to continually fault My.WBS, it does bring many design questions to my attention. See the example below:
1. Red on blue is used to show a new message, but to my understanding with such low contrast between the two colours, surely that text may appear near invisible to some users who suffer from colour-blindness?
2. More applicable to users generally, we have brown on brown for previously visited resources. Contrast is low to everyone, making it extremely difficult to read at a distance.
Agreed, colour can be used to help highlight the different types of posting, but it does not need to be the background colour. Options available could simply be a coloured box, or the block to the left (e.g. "13.35 Resources") in the colour.
Again, more things to be wary of in my new portal design!
In general, My.WBS is the perfect example of how not to design a portal.
24 Nov 2005, 13:22
I'd agree that the design has many weaknesses, though I think all credit must be given to the My.WBS team for getting the content there and more importantly integrated.
26 Nov 2005, 15:50
Andrew Martin
I will be interested to see the WBS team's reaction to this comment. It does seem a fair criticism to me – I'm just surprised because I believe that the original team spent considerable time considering colour schemes in the interests of accessibility …
03 Jan 2006, 09:54
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