Information design fail

[kpreid]

I thought I knew better, but it took someone else to point out what was wrong with this display of times available for appointments:

If it happens not to leap out at you: which color indicates available, and which indicates unavailable? I knew perfectly well, of course: I drew shaded boxes to indicate the times of interest, i.e. the available ones — but the interpretation that the unavailable times are blocked off is equally plausible.

This could be solved by a legend, but that is less readable at a glance and unaesthetic. What I did — after printing several copies and then having the problem pointed out — was hand-draw arrows-to-bars (⇤⇥) vertically over the available spans. But what would have been a good clean solution to start with? What comes to mind is to eliminate the grid lines in the unavailable areas, so that only the gray-is-available interpretation provides definite start and end times.

What would you do?

Comments

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

General reply:

Expanding the time range is one of the options I thought of while writing this post, but I cut it afterward. It seems reasonably clear, but will take up more space.

Dark vs. light, or hatching is a good point. I don't like the idea of having a general dark background for the whole chart though — too much contrast with the overall white paper.

I should clarify that this is not a write-in appointment book (though there is one); this is an advertisement indicating the available times, which are signed up for elsewhere.

Red vs. green is a classic “AUGH THE COLORS” aesthetic mistake if done poorly; I can't offhand imagine any shades of red and green that would work well for this situation — being clearly meaningful and yet neither muddy nor garish.

[wrog]

there's also the small matter that red-green colorblindness is fairly common.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether there's some biological connection between those two facts (that saturated red and green abutting are garish and that the commonest form of colorblindness is red-green). That is, assuming the ‘garish’ part isn't just me.

[wrog]

My guess is it has a lot more to do with the green part of the visible spectrum being extremely narrow (as compared with red and blue) and therefore really easy to "get wrong" as it were...