Man, let me tell ya, reds just plain suck. No, seriously.
I got burned by this on a project a while back, a real mess it was. We were rolling out this brand-spanking-new dashboard for monitoring all our systems. Looked flashy, you know? All modern and stuff. Or so they sold it to us.
My Brush with the Red Menace
But the folks who designed this thing, bless their hearts, they had this brilliant idea: everything that wasn’t perfectly, happily green had to be fire-engine red. I’m not kidding. Here’s a taste of what got the red treatment:
- A tiny little hiccup, maybe a process using a bit more memory than usual for a few seconds? RED.
- Just an informational ‘hey, look at me for a sec’ notification someone, somewhere, thought was super important? RED.
- The whole damn system about to actually crash and burn, take down the entire operation? You guessed it, also RED.
So, you’d walk in on a Monday morning, or heck, any time of day, and glance at the main monitoring screen. It was like staring into the sun, if the sun was having a very bad, very red day. Just a wall of angry, screaming red. It was completely overwhelming.
And you know what happens when everything is screaming for attention at the top of its lungs? Nothing actually gets your attention. After a few days, maybe a week at most, your brain just learns to tune it all out. It’s like alarm fatigue, but for your eyes. We started missing the real red alerts, the ‘oh crap, drop everything now!’ ones, ’cause they were just camouflaged, swimming in a sea of other, less critical reds.
I tried to talk some sense into the decision-makers. I really did. I went up and said something like, ‘Guys, with all due respect, this is just nuts. How about we use, I don’t know, yellow for a simple heads-up? Maybe orange for something that’s a bit more serious, needs looking at pretty soon? And we keep red for when the world is genuinely ending, you know, proper, full-blown emergencies?’ Makes sense, right? That’s how traffic lights work, for crying out loud.
Nah. The answer I got back was some corporate-speak masterpiece along the lines of, ‘Red demands attention.’ Genius. Pure, unadulterated genius. Sure, it demands so much attention that you end up giving it absolutely none because you can’t tell what’s a minor papercut from a gaping wound that’s bleeding out.
We had a couple of pretty scary moments because of this whole setup. Stuff that should’ve been jumped on right away, fixed in minutes, but just got lost in that pervasive red fog. It took a pretty big screw-up, one that actually made some of the higher-ups start sweating bullets, before they even considered that maybe, just maybe, their all-red-all-the-time strategy wasn’t the design masterpiece they thought it was. Even then, getting them to actually change it was like pulling teeth. Slow, painful, and with a lot of grumbling.
So now, whenever I see some new interface or dashboard just splattered with red for every damn little thing, I just shake my head. It’s a surefire sign of bad design, and it usually means trouble’s brewing, or at the very least, a lot of wasted effort and missed signals are on the horizon. Reds, when they’re all over the place like that, they just suck. Period. They stop meaning anything important, and that’s a big problem.
