Misleading conclusionsĭepending on your audience, the wrong choice can have serious consequences. Your audience is going to struggle to tell the nuances apart if you use rainbow colors rather than sticking to a graduated scale of one color. The details get technical very quickly, but the key lesson is rainbow colors only show differences when the actual color changes, while color gradients allow people to see gradual changes. We’re better at seeing small changes within single color ranges because luminance and saturation values change smoothly where colors do not, wrote Robert Kosara, visual analysis researcher at Tableau and an expert on how we see color, on his personal website, EagerEyes. But human eyes aren’t good at detecting the edges of different colors sitting side by side. Visualizations tell the story behind changes in data their job is to simplify complex patterns into an illustration that lets you understand - ideally at a glance - what’s going on. Taylor II, professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. However, if people are given paint chips colored red, green, yellow, and blue and asked to put them in order, the results vary,” according to researchers David Borland and Russell M. People generally agree on the progression from light to dark, but sort colors differently, as shown here: “If people are given a series of gray paint chips and asked to put them in order, they will consistently place them in either a dark-to-light or light-to-dark order. That means if you’re serving up visuals to an audience of hundreds of thousands, you’re missing out on a large slice of your audience.Įven though most people aren’t colorblind, rainbow color schemes can be confusing because there’s no clear “greater than” or “less than” logic to ordering the colors, warn computer science researchers David Borland and Russell M. (Try this color vision test to see if you’re one of them.) Colorblindness affects up to 10 percent of men. People who are colorblind have difficulties detecting colors, particularly red and green. Here are some reasons why rainbow colors are the “wrong choice”: Colorblindness and ordering colors Robinson, geography professor at Pennsylvia State University, wrote in an online class on Coursera, which taught students how to use geospatial technologies to map data. Rainbow color schemes are “almost always the wrong choice,” Anthony C. Detecting the colors at all is a problem for more readers than you might guess, and the rest of the audience will find it easier to understand the visualization if it’s presented with a different palette. Rainbow color schemes - also called spectral color schemes - are frequent choices for visualizing data, both because they look bold and exciting and because they’re the default for many visualization software tools. But you have to choose carefully in designing a map or chart, and one of the biggest mistakes is misusing rainbow colors. Data visualizations are beautiful, exciting ways to tell stories.
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