meaning of "status" icon on obitalk webportal

[coachclass]

Hello,
I was trying to troubleshoot my parent's Obihai remotely.  He's in China, I'm in US.  On the dashboard, there is a status column with an icon that looks like the bust of a person.  The icon is "green" when their obihai is connected to the network, and brown color when it has no network connection.  That's kind of unintuitive.

If you've never seen it in the green connected mode, you might assume that the person icon means it's connected.  Wouldn't it be much simpler to show a green color "connected" text and a red color text "disconnected".

That eliminates all ambiguity.  The color icons seem unnecessarily confusing.

[QBZappy]

coachclass,

Your comments are good. To make it more confusing you may sooner or later see the OBi as showing not connected on the dashboard when in fact the OBi is all well and good. For months the dashboard has been reporting false unregistered OBis, as per a few posts and my own experience. It is a known problem.

[ShermanObi]

If you mouse over the green icon, 'Online' will pop-up.
If you mouse over the amber icon, 'Offline' will pop-up.

[Dale]

UI design class 101 says do not use color to indicate status (or anything else) Some people with color blindness cannot see the differences.

Hovering over it is not the solution. Get two icons, one that shows a connection and one that shows no connection. Green and brown people do not imply connection and no connection in a human brain. 

[Dav3yDark0]

UI design class 101 says do not use color to indicate status (or anything else) Some people with color blindness cannot see the differences.

Hovering over it is not the solution. Get two icons, one that shows a connection and one that shows no connection. Green and brown people do not imply connection and no connection in a human brain. 

I happen to be colorblind myself, and I really do hate how many things use orange/red and green to differentiate states. Red/green colorblindness is the most common and about 1/3 of all males have some degree of color defect, so I for one would really like developers to take this more into account. I have numerous electronic devices that have a red/orange light for being off and a green on for being on, and I can't see the difference on most of them. I would prefer blue for ON and red for OFF if it were my choice. Fraxis games used to make colorblind patches for their turn based strategy games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, and I found those patches to be of great help in seeing the differences in the maps within the games. In fact I still at times play some of those older games.

If anyone wants to test out any interface or elements for use by a colorblind user I would be more than willing to put my colorblindness to use in helping improve the look for those of us that are color deprived.

Dave