Three Colors, One Result
While preparing this week's card news series, Art created three background color options. Pastel blue, soft yellow, and deep navy. Inside the team, many people felt the deep navy looked the most polished. On screen, it really did have a premium feel.
But when Robo ran an accessibility check, the deep navy option was disqualified right at the start. The contrast between the text and background didn't meet the required standard. To the eye it looked fine, but the actual numbers said the readability didn't pass.
Looking good and being readable turned out to be two different things.
At first, everyone was a bit surprised. The option that looked best based on feeling was the very first one filtered out once the numbers came in. But because of that, we added a rule to the color selection process that hadn't existed before. Every option now has to pass a contrast check before it can be finalized.
The change after adding that rule was bigger than expected. Once a numeric standard entered a process that used to run on instinct, almost no colors got disqualified from the next round onward. That's because everyone started choosing from a range that could already pass the check.
In a small team run by non engineers, moments where instinct collides with standards come up often. What matters more than deciding who was right is turning that moment into a rule. This experiment was one small example of that. In the end, pastel blue was chosen, and this week's card news went out in that color.