Best practice for grid of status flags?

Question

We have a status page that shows users a set of predicate properties about devices in a system. It's a simple table with a bunch of ticks used to indicate the true state.

Of course, over the years new requirements have been packed into the table, and now we have something like -

Green tick = yes

Grey tick = not available

No tick = Not relevant

Text in green = working OK.

etc.etc. Hopefully 'nuff said.

Possible states we're trying to convey change according to the column. In this example we'd have

• Connected - yes | no
• Healthy - yes | no | n/a (e.g. if not connected)
• Sensors - present and working | present and not working | not present

Can someone point me at, or share their thoughts on best practice in this area?

Answer 1

Best practice includes

• Don't use color as the only information carrier (some people don't distinguish colors very well)

• Don't use forms that are ambiguous (no check might mean "not observed" rather than "not relevant")

• Do use tokens that have fairly well-defined meanings (e.g. NA for not relevant)

If you'd like to lay out the list of states, we could probably advise on how to update the display to be more meaningful.