We need to display the state of some machines in our web application. The machines can have about 8 different states.
Our idea is to make a site where the user can see all machines and their state. But we don’t really know how to display the individual machines.
A co-worker had the idea of doing something with color codes. Each machine would be displayed as a rectangle in a different color (which indicates its state). Something like this:
I don’t really like this idea because I think the users can’t remember what each color means, respectively it will take a long time until the users know which color stands for which state.
Do you have any ideas how we could display the machines and their state?
The requirements:
- The site is mainly viewed in desktop browsers. But we also need to support tablets.
- The users should see the state without clicking or hovering the machines
- We need to display 20 to 300 machines on the site. (If possible without paging)