At Cisco, I’m proud to be part of a team committed to creating solutions for every type of worker—across any workstyle, on any device. Central to this mission is designing experiences that are inclusive and accessible, ensuring everyone—not just the majority—can benefit fully from our technology.
As a reflection of this mission, I’m excited to share that Webex has won a San Francisco Design Week Award for Inclusive Data Visualization in High Contrast Mode. This project, led by Mina Yoo and Prakruthi Suresh, breaks through OS constraints to deliver rich, high-contrast analytics in Webex Calling Customer Assist, helping businesses better understand and optimize customer interactions.
The Design Challenge
Webex Calling Customer Assist provides a robust analytics experience, delivering detailed visualizations of metrics like agent and queue performance, hold times, abandoned call rates, and more. Its goal is to transform complex data into meaningful insights that are easy to understand and act on.
Accessibility is a crucial part of this goal, because our solutions are used by people of all abilities around the world—and customer assistance is a critical function for every business. High contrast mode plays an essential role in a comprehensive accessibility strategy, helping users with visual impairments, color blindness, and light sensitivity by increasing the contrast between text, interface elements, and background colors.
While the Microsoft Windows operating system offers built-in high contrast themes, they’re limited to a palette of just three colors that can be used for data representation—posing a challenge for Customer Assist analytics dashboards, which rely on color to represent multiple data series in visualizations such as pie charts and graphs. With only three colors, essential data can become indistinguishable or lost.
Our Solution
To address OS-level limitations in high contrast mode, the Webex team implemented three innovative design strategies:
1. Combine Color and Shape
Given the limited number of predefined high contrast colors and the need to avoid relying solely on color, we use a combination of color and shape to convey information. This improves accessibility and enhances data differentiation.
Once a mapping is defined, it’s applied consistently across visualizations. For example:
- Donut charts: Up to three categories can use the three available colors. Beyond that, unique shape and color pairings are used within each slice.
- Line charts: Legends and data points use the same color/shape pairings to improve clarity.
- Side-by-side charts: Consistent category mapping across different chart types (e.g., donut and line) reinforces understanding.
2. Limit Data to Reduce Cognitive Load
To avoid overwhelming users, we limit the number of data categories shown at once or offer filtering options for smaller comparisons. While combining color and shape expands the number of distinguishable categories, it’s not limitless. Following Miller’s Law (7±2), we recommend:
- Limiting visualized categories to 5–7 for clarity.
- Capping unique color/shape combinations at 12, as users struggle to distinguish more.
Less critical data can be grouped under “Other,” or displayed through interactive filters to simplify analysis.
3. Use Micro-Interactions for Clarity
Micro-interactions—like subtle animations or focus highlights—guide users through complex data and emphasize key insights. For instance, in real-time dashboards using line charts, recent data points are often the highest priority. Highlighting the latest point with a default focus state and pairing it with a persistent tooltip or side panel draws attention and enhances decision-making. These context-aware cues help users interpret data faster and more intuitively.
The Result
By combining our three core design strategies, we’ve developed a high contrast version of Customer Assist analytics that makes complex data easy to interpret across a variety of visualizations—all while meeting accessibility needs.
In the example above, you can see the standard (non–high contrast) version of Customer Assist analytics, showing five key data series that are essential for understanding queue performance. Now compare it to the version in high contrast mode below. Using our enhanced design approach, each data series is clearly distinguishable, and the visual treatment remains consistent across different types of charts, making it easier for everyone to analyze and act on insights.
With over 455 million users of the Webex app on Windows worldwide, I’m proud of the impact our team has made in making our solutions more inclusive. It’s a strong reflection of Cisco’s broader vision of Powering an Inclusive Future for All, and a clear example of how we’re using thoughtful design to break down barriers, improve equity, and create opportunities for people everywhere.
Learn more:
Powering an Inclusive Future for All
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