Absence of an identifiable pattern to aid interpretation of the color codes assigned to added clocks
Version Information
Application Version: GNOME Clocks 45.0
Language: English Language
GNOME Version: 45.4
Distro: Fedora
Version: Fedora 39 (Workstation Edition)
Issue Description
The relationship between the different colors assigned to the clocks and time itself, the period of day, and how the clocks relate to one another, is not apparent in a way that makes this information useful to the user. This is because the color assignment appears to be random, making it quite challenging to find a consistent relationship between the colors and any characteristic of time that I expected it to represent.
In the attached image, I have assigned tags to indicate different hour bands and the colors they’ve been assigned by the application in different instances.
If you analyze the image carefully, you’ll observe how multiple clocks reading times within the same hour-band have received inconsistent color assignments. You will also observe that the color codes are not consistently related to time of day (i.e. morning, afternoon, evening), or daylight and sunset.
I turned to the “Help” documentation for an explanation but couldn’t find any information to aid me in deciphering what the colors meant in there as well.
Recommendations
I suggest the following:
- Clearly defining the role of the color codes and how they are to be assigned.
- Standardizing the assignment of the colors for consistency to make the associations more apparent to the user.
- Ensuring that the associations being represented are simple and expected by the user, so they are not too abstract for the user to intuitively deduce.