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Comment by mgh2 | Hacker News Reader

The author does not try to explain the subtleties of the design decision. Yes, putting two opposing choices next to each other might encourage some errors, at least initially, but what if the designers decided to do this because users were already trained to see this pattern in all other software? Because they were building on top of an already established mental model?

Red is a double-edged sword: it has been identified as attention in nature (danger and attraction), so psychologically speaking it might warn AND nonintentional lead a user to a perceived action.

What is the solution? Would you put it opposite to each other prompting the user to become frustrated when they cannot find the button to hang up? (X) closing the app does not imply hanging up. This is not a life or death situation (unlike healthcare), so at least offer some explanation of why it was designed that way or offer an alternative solution.

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Posting something like this as a reply to the top comment when it's completely irrelevant to the top comment has the effect of hijacking the thread. Please don't do that. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26401637 for further explanation.

I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395513 now.

There are no subtleties. The post contains a specific example in Google Meet, which is used by "the general public" and not by anyone "already trained to see this pattern in all other software". It's confusing for a lot of people.

Have you ever watched a "normal" person try to complete a task on a computer? They routinely click the wrong mouse buttons (or double/single click when they should single/double click), close windows, press in the wrong places in the GUI, and generally fumble around until they get the task done. But they don't get exasperated, because they have been conditioned to expect that computers are confusing, and they persist on with their work. And that's why "normal" people think that computers are mysterious complicated beasts.

Because the UX sucks. Everywhere.

The neverending reality of the Edigerian nipple.

Lots of big companies (ie Apple) have thrown massive amounts of work into trying to make better UIs and it produced stuff like itunes and the one button mouse that has a secret right click. Maybe we just shouldn't expect some things to be so simple?

But the author gave a perfectly reasonable alternative solution: put destructive actions reasonably far from common non-destructive ones. There are many other valid approaches: e.g. Chrome prompts "Hold cmd+q to quit" if you fat-finger it. Github asks you to type out the name of repo if you press the delete repo button. Just make the odd-one-out action different in some significant way.

Destructive actions should be suppressed when they are rare. This is the case for "Reset" or "Close Application". For a video chat, however, "Hang Up" is one of the most common actions, and one that is urgent to be able to find rapidly. As an example, Discord puts hang up nowhere near the mute/video buttons - and every time I want to leave a call I have to search for 15 seconds to find it because it's over in a corner near nothing else currently in use.

Zoom puts the "end meeting" button on the right bottom corner (and volume/video toggles on the left bottom corner). The buttons look different and they are labeled in plain text (no guessing what an icon means). Cmd+w prompts before closing. It's clean, it's intuitive, it's not rocket science.

You mentioned red is identified as danger in nature and that made me think... I'm assuming red is danger because blood is red? If so, I bet if we were to visit an alien civilization on another planet who has a different biological process, they may have different colored blood and their warning buttons may instead be blue or green even. Interesting to think about!

You don't even need to leave this planet to find and example of this. In East Asia, red symbolizes prosperity, and the stock market tickers use red to indicate gains.

I've always wondered about this.

We have a site dealing with finance for a East Asia audience. It's original audience was Europe with a blue theme (signifies trust etc) and it got extended to Asia (english speaking still). So we just themed it by changing the branding colors to the East Asia organizations color. Which is... red signifying prosperity. As in 10 shades of red.

The site has the typical warning/alert/error message feedback in forms/charts etc... in different reds/oranges/etc. I spent a bit of time trying to find a Asia focused UX guide on color for alerts/errors without luck. Does anyone have suggestions? I've asked a few different culturally native Asians from various countries and just get resigned shrugs.

Note: The messages have icons/text to go with them so it's not a total disaster but it is hard to figure out

I will confess I didn't believe you, which makes me ashamed since I work in finance. But then I went to the Shanghai stock exchange and their English language website uses red for losses and green for gains, but if you switch to the Mandarin website, it's the complete opposite. I appreciate that insight.

[1] http://english.sse.com.cn/

[2] http://www.sse.com.cn/

There is an interesting example of this in Robert J. Sawyer's The Neanderthal Parallax, which has an alternate world where the Neanderthals became the dominant human species.

In the Neanderthal world, red means "good" or "go" and green means "danger" or "stop".

This is because red is the color of good meat and green is the color of bad meat.

In a remarkable HN coincidence, I was trying to remember the name of this series when I ran across kleer001's comment on "At Home with Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals", also on the HN home page right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381829

That is an excellent book BTW, thanks for mentioning it.

I am Canadian, and being able to read Canadian locales referenced in his books as places that I have been and are aware-of is a rare treat in Sci-Fi.

I highly encourage any SciFi fan to read his works.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids

My guess would be that it's because of fire. While fire is an incredibly useful tool, a wildfire can be devastating for the whole ecosystem.

RED = FIRE => RUN AWAY WHILE YOU STILL CAN

Red means "cancel" or "stop", which are safe actions, not dangerous ones. Red is the color of health and safety.

Blue is the color of danger because it means "confirm changes". Blue is the color of the abyss, and aliens would agree on this.

Red only works if you have color vision. It shouldn't be relied on. (Traffic lights, for example, have a consistent order with red on top.)

Unless they are the ones used on the railways, where the red light is on the bottom. Reason for this apparently, means that a build up of snow can't obscure it, causing a driver to not see it and ram up the back of another train. Of course nowadays, there's overrides to stop trains running red lights, but the red lights are still orientated at the bottom.

It's still consistent.

It's just not the same pattern for roads and railways, but that's fine.

With the most common forms of color blindness (and maybe all of them?), people can still tell the difference between a white button and a red one

Concerning traffic lights color blind can see which one is lit, too. UI buttons doesn't have that feedback mostly (unless greyed out as inactive etc).

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