Confusing colour choices

Here's a question that should be simple enough: which of these two options is selected?

Monday, December 28, 2020

More importantly, which option will the majority of people think is selected? It’s possible to make a case for both answers—I found this on a twitter thread asking the same question, and both options had lots of votes. There was no clear winner. And that’s a problem.

Most of the replies reasoned, I don’t know, it just doesn’t make sense the other way, or words to that effect. This got me thinking, What cues are people picking up on, and how are those cues informing them? Here’s one train of thought on the matter.

The Anchoring Effect

We can ‘latch on’ and overvalue a certain piece of information—either because that’s what was first presented to us, or because of some previous association. Whether that information is useful or relevent does not always impact how much we value it. All that matters is that for whatever reason, we’ve latched onto it, and everything else that comes after it is secondary.

Different people have different anchors

Does this image remind you of a vacant-occupied conference room door sign? In this case, you might see the ‘slider’ as being the same material as the border, which means ‘Received’ is closer to you and therefore is selected, while ‘Sent’ is in the background, or unselected.

Do you think of the contrast between the font colour and background colour for the two sides? In this case, more contrast, which is associated with things in the foreground, means ‘Sent’ is selected, and ‘Received,’ which is literally more greyed, is in the background, or unselected.