Weathering the Broken Links

I guess you could say I’m disabled.  I have a mild form of color blindness.  I can see all the colors, but discriminating certain combinations of color is harder for me than for someone who’s not color blind.

Does it create problems for me?  Not really.  But it lends to me getting aggravated from time to time.  Particularly when looking at charts or other graphics that use colors as the primary means to distinguish data, such as in this mock Excel line chart:

Excel chose the colors for the series and, frankly, while I can tell the colors of Series 1 and Series 4 apart, when you start overlapping the series lines, I have to study the chart pretty closlely in parts to determine if a line is really blue or purple.

Well, on my recent trip to Houston, we visited The Houston Museum of Natural Science where visitors were given a very nice, colorful map of the museum’s four levels in order to locate exhibits.  Thanks to the modern wonders, the folks who run the museums website, make a PDF version of the map available for download here.

For purposes of this entry, I’ve snipped from that PDF the diagram for the main level and included it here.  Go ahead and click it to see a bigger version.

Start by looking at the colors.  There are nine colored areas and there’s a legend on the right with a colored key showing the name of each area next to a small swatch of color.

Now consider that you might be in a dimly lit area of the museum and that you might be color blind to some degree.  You may not see the problem, but I immediately wondered how to find my way to the dinosaurs (I had my son with me).  Fortunately, the map designer saw fit to put drawings of the exhibit contents around the perimeter of the map.  It was trivial to follow the line from the dinosaur skeleton to the green hall in the center of the map.

But wait, let’s say they hadn’t put the exhibit pictures around the outside.  Now what?  I’d start scanning the list of rooms in the legend looking for the word “Dinosaurs.”  Sadly, this word is absent from the hall legend.  The dinosaurs are in one of the three hall that have a generic name: the name of someone the hall is honoring and not the contents of the exhibit shown in that hall (yet another issue with the map).  So not only would I be struggling to match some of the colors with some of the hall names, but I’d also still have no clue what was in some of the hall.   I’d have been wandering aimlessly or, shedding the male navigation defect gene, asking directions.

Basically, the coloring in the diagram only serves a few secondary purposes:

1. add eye/mind-pleasing splashes of color
2. highlight exhibit halls as distinct from corridors
3. allow visitors to look up the formal names of the exhibit halls.

Not that there isn’t value in these factors, but it costs money and adds little functional value;  your average visitor simply doesn’t need these things.

Couple this with the fact that it’s printed on a light card stock that folds out to 19×11 inches and doesn’t fold up nicely into something that’ll slip in a back or shirt pocket and it just seemed like an extravagant waste to me, someone who’s ultimately paying to print these visitor’s guides.

Okay.  Out With The The Color

Now also consider that on the museum’s own website, they have a much plainer version of the facility map here:

On the referenced page, they do a marginally better job labeling things:

1. Cockrell Butterfly Center & the Brown Hall of Entomology
2. Wiess Energy Hall
3. Wortham IMAX Theatre
4. Hall of Paleontology
5. Welch Chemistry Hall
6. Burke Baker Planetarium
7. Herman Brown Gallery
8. Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Gallery
9. Cockrell Sundial

Now you can tell where the dinosaurs are, if you know what Paleontology means.  Buy without pictures, can you tell what the Herman Brown Gallery and jesse H and Mary Gibbs Jones Gallery’s are for?  So it’s still not a winner.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you.  There’s probably only a few other geeks out there with enough interest in usability issues to care.  I just keep finding my head shaking when I consider how much effort was probably expended to produce two sets of maps, each with major accessibility and usability flaws.

What Am I Going To Do About It?

I’m not sure, but to follow my own new philosophy, since I bitched about it, I’ve got to take action.  Maybe I’ll dig for the name of the media firm or person that did the maps and nicely pass along my thoughts.  And maybe the next revision will be easier to use.

I’ll let you know.