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Comment by yathern | Hacker News Reader

Colors are distance to the pareto frontier for the given setting for "dealscope"! Easily noticed when axis and color are set to the same dimension (EG CPU) - but setting to different things allows you to visualize two dimensions (three, with price) without needing a 3D chart. I found it really useful to find outliers, but I realize it's a bit nonstandard!

Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal

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It's great that you understand the chart. Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us. We read green then yellow then red as a sign of DECREASING fit. And a bunch of blues next to that green to red progression reads as "no data" or "not relevant" or something.

It's great that you have the data. I'm sure that took a lot of time to obtain. Spending a few more percent of your total time making the presentation of the data intuitive to others is almost certainly the highest ROI thing you can do at this point, if you want your site to be useful enough to get enough visitors to pay for the cost of acquiring the data.

Feel free to tell me that red is the lowest Pareto value and that's why you made the frontier red, or whatever. I'll still respond that the details of the presentation matters enormously to adoption, and the current presentation is very far from optimally intuitive to those of us who didn't personally develop the data.

Oh for sure - your feedback is totally helpful, I agree the colors are not obvious (especially red being good), perhaps my tone sounded dismissive but that was not the intention at all - symtom of a quick response from my phone! I'll definitely work on improving the readability of the colors and what it means (tricky to find the balance between nerdily over explaining how it works)

If there was a key explaining what the colors meant that would be great. And maybe the option to select colors or pick between a couple of alternatives - i think in western culture green is good but in Chinese i think they normally think of red as the best - just being able to swap between those two defaults would probably be enough - thanks for your hard work - much appreciated

There is; click on the "CPU DEALSCOPE" button on the page and it shows a legend, while also letting you change what the primary axis of color-coding is. (Though oddly, the x-axis itself doesn't change, so random dots end up colored after changing this.)

the color allocation is closer to chinese symbolism than western. You don't need to change it, just describe it somewhere, probably with a rainbow strip, maybe bottom right, like a scale symbol on a map.

Oh good point - I was thinking more like "how hot is this deal" (and thus red == best) as opposed to just "good or bad".

Now when clicking on the 'dealscope' button there's a little modal which tries to clear it up a bit.

> "how hot is this deal" (and thus red == best)

If that's the intuition you want, then wouldn't it be natural to use the blackbody radiation spectrum (a.k.a. "color temperature")? Red hot -> white hot -> blue hot.

>Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us

Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.

Yeah. It was so obvious to me I didn't think about it until I read the comments. Makes sense that it would trip some people up, though.

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