Bettina Kast

Bettina is a skilled, enthusiastic, results-driven Principal UX Product Designer based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With over two decades experience in strategic design, product design, enterprise UX, enterprise AI, and data products, she brings a unique perspective and empathy to user-centric designs and innovations.

Project Accessibility Innovation

INNOVATION & PRODUCT DESIGN

Accessible data visualization

What we were working on

A set of “standard” visualization methods and color palettes that make data visualizations look like the Pega brand, while at the same time being accessible.

What I did

I was leading the design for data visualization capabilities at Pega by aligning various data visualization libraries with each other, enhancing visualization capabilities, and improving data encoding methods.

  • Researched data visualization methods
  • Collaborated with Marketing and Creative Services to align with corporate colors
  • Interviewed stakeholders to define goals and scope
  • Identified encoding use cases to be supported
  • Evaluated data encoding in the context to accessibility
  • Created color palettes for categorical, continuous and divergent data encoding
  • Performed usability studies with color-blind participants to adjust palettes
  • Collaborated with front-end developer to interpolate key colors and build color palettes into the design system

Outcome

Color palettes for categoric data.
Color palettes for continuous and divergent data dan also be applied to categories.
Divergent color palettes are great encoding methods to reveal patterns in continuous data such as heat maps in matrices.
Divergent color palettes are also suitable for world maps and geographic data.
The standard red-amber-green palette was augmented with spcial
An initial simulation test helped with preparing for validating color palettes with color blind people.
On a project level
  • Total of 23 palettes that cover four main types and four sub-types of color blindness
  • Each color palette can interpolate tints and can scale up to 200 classes required for granular heat maps
  • Two extra red-amber-green palettes tailored to the needs of two different types of red-green color blindness