Color Universal Design(CUD) for Business Intelligence Dashboards

I recently learned about Color Universal Design and it came to my mind that how can we use it for Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards.

Before we jump to the topic, let’s just understand what is meant by color blindness

What is color Blindness

Color blindness, or color vision deficiency, is the inability or decreased ability to see color, or perceive color differences, under normal lighting conditions. Color blindness affects a significant percentage of the population…Color blindness affects a large number of individuals, with protanopia and deuteranopia being the most common types.

— Wiki

Color blind test (credits Flickr)

If you don’t notice a difference in the above images, you’re not alone — approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women suffer from some form of color blindness.

Considering these statistics, it’s not a bad idea to test BI dashboards for those who can’t see the entire spectrum of color.

Little less, Little more-

Modern BI tools tableau, Spotfire, and QlikView allow the user to design beautiful dashboards with virtually any kind of a data in just a few minutes. Each of these tools is having default color palettes, but very few people use them as it is. The colors get customized to follow company brand, which might get modified (like the use of gradient) by internal development teams without being verified by designers.

Choosing colors could be a difficult task for many of you. I often get confused with color gradients.

On the other side, what if the designer is color blind?

Here is the interesting answer by Abhinav Sharma, a product designer at Quora

What is it like to be a color blind designer?

Design for All

Color Universal Design (CUD) is a user-oriented design system that ensures that graphical information is conveyed accurately to people with various types of color vision, including people with color blindness. Several countries have guidelines that require CUD-compliant graphics in public spaces.

The color blindness simulation tools help you understand how difficult it can be for a person with color blindness to distinguish design elements that only differ in color from the surrounding objects.

Here is an outcome of a simulation I ran for demo dashboard at http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos

So how can you design color friendly? Follow some simple principles for Color Universal Design.

Core Principles of CUD

• Choose a balanced color schemes that can be easily identified by people with all types of color vision, in consideration with the actual lighting conditions and usage environment.
• Combine colors with different shapes, positions, line types and coloring patterns
• Clearly state color names where users are expected to use color names in communication.

Color blindness simulation tools

Below is a list of some of the tools available for testing and simulation.

1. Palleton: Choose a color palette using techniques like monochrome adjacent colors, triad, tetrad and also simulate them side by side
2. Vischeck: Just upload your image, choose the condition and run the test.
3. http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/

If you are looking for data security, you can go for desktop tools:

1. ColorOracle
2. Color Contrast Analyser
3. vsolve
4. Sim Daltonism:

The tools I’ve mentioned above are the one I found on different blogs, there are other’s out there and I encourage you to explore more. If you find any other useful tool, Please share them in the comments!

So, what is the perfect tool?

I don’t think it makes a lot of difference which tools you use.

Use the results as starting point or guidance, apply some of your own common sense, and you should be able to find a balance between right colors and good looking dashboards.

After reading this article, you might be thinking about taking a test of color blindness.

Here is the online test for that: http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/

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