I’ve been pondering an interesting question today. In designing a new application which displays the status of an item in three states; ‘available’, ‘unavailable’ or ‘mine’, I’ve had to think of which colours to use to indicate the state.
The team here are divided. 1/2 think that as the application needs to convey a number of states to the user, the choice of colour needs help the user build a mental model. There people are leaning towards the green is available, yellow is mine and grey is unavailable. The other 1/2 are in favour of using the brand colours (pink and blue) to convey available/unavailable. All agree that grey is a good colour for unavailable.
My preference is for the yellow/green approach but I’m certainly no marketer.
What do you think? Is there a reason why you would favour one approach over the other?
