User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
There's a list of items, some of them require attention. I'm thinking about using the color red.
It used to be used for errors, so red was an unpleasant color. Today we have red notifications on iOS and Facebook, where users love to see them (at least on Facebook).
How do you think it feels on a task list?
If you're attempting to get a non-colorblind user's attention, yellow is actually the most attention grabbing color.
Yellow is less associated with anger and frustration (although it is still sometimes associated with those feelings), it is generally shown to be a more positive color.
Red does have more of an association with errors, and as @user12999 mentioned, things that are overdue (you can kind of lump this under the same category of 'error'). You'll find that yellow is more often associated with warnings than errors.
Today we have red notifications on iOS and Facebook, where users love to see them (at least on Facebook).
When considering Facebook and iOS's notification icons my mind goes immediately to colors that contrast well with red. Blue is one of red's triads and thus they contrast well -- therefore considering Facebook is mostly blue, red pops out the best. On iOS my opinion is that the badge was originally associated with the primarily green phone and text message icons and green is red's complement. As well, you'll find that the other original primary user of the notification badge was the mail app which is primarily blue.
In summary, if you're just trying to draw attention to an item, I think yellow is your best bet unless the item is overdue or an error then you should go with red. I would also urge to consider @Bevan's excellent point on not only grabbing attention by color, but by other methods of emphasis he has noted as well.
Never differentiate items in a list solely on the basis of colour - you'll be hiding that functionality from that non-insignificant proportion of your audience with some form of colour vision impairment.
While there are some people who see the world in a purely mono-chromatic way, there are a great deal more who have trouble perceiving certain colours.
For example, I have a lower than usual sensitivity to red - and I've passed it on to my son. Point to a red flower, and we can tell you it's red, no problem. Point to a word written in red, surrounded by other text written in black, and we can't see any difference.
Best approach that I've seen - and I've seen it in a lot of places - is to use a combination of factors.
For example, these would all work:
More information: Wikipedia article on Colour blindness
If, generally, there are many noticications in red, it thus creates a pattern which can be used. After all, meaning gets assigned to a color, not the other way round. That said, if you want to grab attention, don't focus on the color, focus on the contrast instead. For instance: yellow jumps off a black page, but looks quite dim on a white page. If you want to take color blindness into account, make sure that your contrasts have sufficient difference in lightness. It's as simple as that…
