I work on a Network management system (NMS) frontend. Basically this app shows a list of alarms, updated in realtime. Such NMS apps already exist in a large variety, but two things they have in common:
Point 1 makes perfect sense to me. But point 2? Is there any evidence that having a rainbow on your screen makes you work better? What is a good approach to solve this problem?
The number of colors seems to be overkill in this situation. To illustrate severity I think it's more useful to stick to a simple, yet well known convention...
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
You'll notice that I'm using very light colors above. That's because the original colors are too dark against the black text and it makes the text hard to read. And then, for the sake of red-green color blindness you should probably add an exclamation mark to the high priority items.
Other variations on the above could certainly be used. For example, should low priority items be colored at all? Maybe they should be white to let the higher priority items stand out. But in general I think the number of colors should be kept low enough that people will understand and remember their meaning without having to constantly check a key or legend.
By the way, when it comes to contrast, the black text on a red background is the worst offender in your example with a contrast ratio of 5.25:1. This is just enough to be WCAG 2 AA compliant, but it's not AAA compliant. You can test this yourself here... http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html
I would say that losing the colors is not an option.
I am a former NOC Engineer, meaning that I sat infront of screens like these for 12 hours shifts. And I used the exact interface you are showing me now. But instead imagine 4 screens filled with 6-8 windows of these, each one focusing on a different network.
Now I'm a UX Architect :)
Talk to to people who use it currently. That will give you the insight you need to understand that these colors are awesome but one of the least problems. You need to understand how people work and use these before you change them. Asking this forum will do little because we don't understand the people who use the software. Except me of course :)
If you would try to remove the colors from my screen I would hit you :) Because having a job that requires you to monitor a screen like this by virtue means that most of the time nothing happens. So I browse the web, watch movies on my private laptop and other distractions. Each color, yes all 5 of them, had different meanings at work. And after working hundreds of hours behind these screen you develop an "intuition" for the amount of certain colors that would pour in and also the pattern in which they would arrive. If you would reduce that to icons or something similar you would handicap me.
Only one idea for improvement (there are more)
To help me, it would have been better if I could monitor a certain node/servers/adress, because each shift hands over a list of "trouble" nodes. I want to be able to keep an eye on them, so it would be awesome if I could create a specific watchlist for certain specific nodes that I know are important.
Trust me the colors are important. And you should go outside and observe real people using them. Spend a 12 hour shift with someone, it will do you more than 12 hours behind your own screen ;)
Hope it helped!
Talking to the customers is a good suggestion, since they will be using it on daily basis it should be usable to them first and foremost.
Just an idea, perhaps limiting the colors to the right side would make it less "shouting"? Left side could have some transparency so that the colors are still there but subtle.
Again, I agree that any changes to the UI must be cross-checked with engineers who are currently using it.
For the longest time computer convention is to use color to help give meaning to a message. Traditionally error accompanied with red. Warning with yellow and successful/Good messages with green.
Long term users of any type of system will grow use to seeing items in such a fashion. I would suggest to keep this trend going. The additional color help imply meaning. If you are fixing the UI I would suggest to change the colors a bit to be more ascetically appealing to the eye as users that have to watch these screens for 8 hours a day suffer from eye strain with hard colors like these. I would also suggest accompanying the background color with an icon so those with color blindness can still use the software. Trust me it helps, I know personally!
few thoughts
It very much depends on which information you're trying to get across here. Two examples:
Example 1, some adjustments in case you want to show the types of events taking place. In this case, the current design is't all that bad. Each color could be tied to a type of event. So that for instance a mostly yellow screen would say something about the types of events taking place. I only dimmed the contrasts in the background and dumped the bottom row of colors. Still ugly, but it might work. :-)
Example 2, some adjustments in case you want to show the severity of the events taking place. In this case, the least sever events would be light grey, the most severe would be bright red. Inbetween you'd have a few steps between grey and red. And again, it's not about the background, so those contrasts are dimmed.
Using different colors to differentiate the various notifications can be useful, however, the diversity in background colors seems overwhelming.
Instead consider less background colors and a diversity of foreground colors. Just make sure the contrast between the various foregrounds and their background is high enough and that the various foreground colors are distinguishable (*).
(*) Offer a few themes (and perhaps an option to create custom themes) so that people with eyesight problems can select a color theme that is both comfortable and diverse enough for them (e.g. users with color blindness).
Also try and give default colors that have a correct contextual meaning when possible (e.g. red for error, orange/yellow for warning).
Use diversity in background colors only for limited uses (e.g. selected/active rows).
I love the rule of three. The reason behind is when you design a presentation audience are likely to remember only three things from your presentation. Same rule can be applied here.
Not perfectly related, but i wrote a Debug-Viewer to see what's going in some of the applications I write. I decided to drop "warning" all-together and just have 3 output severities: INFO, DEBUG and ERROR. Info and Debug has no color, Error is red.
I use some extra configurable colors like blue and yellow for areas that interest me, for example messages from a certain services (errors from that service are still red).
color is useful, up to a point. This example goes beyond that point, however, and is now just a crazy mess of primary colors all competing and conflicting with each other.
