Faness 

So the fact that reverting to the previous colors breaks the appearance for the existing color palette is more important than the fact that you have customers who can't use your product with the current colors.  Got it.  I know what to expect out of YNAB development now. 

Please don't make any changes whatsoever to the product.  Any change you make might break things worse than they are already broken, and I have a fix in place for the current color issues.

Faness You need a better change management system if it can't manage something this basic. You can roll back the existing changes to production while doing a development effort to fix the existing issues with the new colors. This is code management 101. it's not rocket surgery.

 Right?! If you can't roll back an update within a day or two at the absolute most, you have no business, well, in this business.

This is getting to the point of absurdity.

Faness Pathetic. If your dev team can't fix this then they're in the wrong business and should be fired immediately.

Patzer We are planning on making improvements in the very near future, but it shouldn't break the fix you have in place. The plan for moving forward is based on the feedback received in this thread, so I hope all users here like the solution in store.

nolesrule In this instance, we can not. We launched the color change feature in a different manner than we usually do, truly believing it was for the betterment of all YNABers. We're working quickly on rectifying this (improvements are now being beta tested).

bevocat We truly apologize for the trouble this has caused. While we couldn't roll back the changes put in place, we are working on a fix!

Forest Green Lightning I understand passion for YNAB runs high, and we do appreciate that investment in the software, but please try to voice your opinion without including insults. We hear you, we understand what happened and we're making steps to not only improve what happened here but to prevent any similar instances in the future.

Faness Please try hiring people who know how to develop software. I work in the atrium with the IT department of a tier 1 research university, and a terrible new website rollout last year got people fired as well as the previous version of the website reinstalled until someone capable took the job.

Faness 

Faness said:
In this instance, we can not. We launched the color change feature in a different manner than we usually do, truly believing it was for the betterment of all YNABers.

Then you're doing CSS wrong.

It's called reverting the production system to the previous version. You do have versioning built into your change management systems, right?

nolesrule Hahaha, here you go, guys! I'm taking a course on Lynda, but this one's free! 

nolesrule We've rolled back previous features when they didn't work as expected, but this feature was handled differently - and we've definitely learned from the occurrence. 

farfromtheusual Exactly. Why not codify the CSS modifications provided by users above into preferences (with visual examples of the results so people can tweak to their heart's content).

nolesrule Really doesn't seem like it's that hard.

YNAB allows us to control our money. Why shouldn't we be allowed to control how that looks?

Ben Is one of the Toolkit developers.  I believe this white font only shows up when the credit card is overspent somewhere else.  It is probably a hold-over from when the bold colors contrasted nicely with the white font.  Could the font be set to change to a dark brown or black when the pill is yellow?  This would likely fix the problem lindsay_g sees.

Thank you, Toolkit people, for responding to people's requests!

Move Light Sound Life It's stunning how quickly and how well the toolkit devs can fix problems in YNAB that the YNAB devs either can't or won't. 

Move Light Sound Life I'm not sure it is an overspent category thing because I did have money in the category to cover it.

The 62.18 which shows as white text on a tan background on the webpage is the money I have ready to pay the card - you can see here on my phone screen it's a nice, distinct, white on dark green.  This has made me think that not only can't I see the white on tan, but the message isn't clear.

'Tan' as a colour doesn't have any associations for me, whereas we all know that 'green' means 'good to go'.

lindsay_g 

Maybe it's like that for any orange, then.  I have most of my normal orange (underfunded, in terms of the goal) showing as blue.  I think the Toolkit option for that is "goal indicator warning color."

The only time I really see orange (or tan/light orange/yellow) is when I've overspent a category paid on credit (that category shows red, but the payment available shows tan) and I haven't covered it yet. 

Move Light Sound Life It's not that, because I've switched to blue in the toolkit. This tan colour in the webpage is definitely saying 'money put aside to pay off a credit card' and 'it's enough money'. Because that's what that money is - it's funded categories for payments on a card which aren't due yet.

In the app it's green you see, which is correct.

I think it's interesting (in a bad way) that there is a pill on the page which neither of us can translate by looking at it. The whole point of icons and graphic communication is that - if it's good - it's obvious!

lindsay_g Well, that's weird, indeed.  Are you sure there's no overspending on credit in another category?  Or a goal/upcoming transaction that hasn't been met?

In my budget, the only way I can get the yellow pill with white text is if I have an overspent category that was spent on credit, and I choose the "unhighlight positive balances."

Then, the PIF Assist feature in the toolkit tells my CC available to be tan/yellow, but the Unhighlight Positive Balance feature makes the font a bold white. 

Without the Unhighlight Positive Balance checked, the text is a dark brown/orange in the gold pill.

But, maybe I just don't quite understand the logic behind these colors.  Or maybe it's a bug from either YNAB or Toolkit.  If it's toolkit, it's likely a bit of code that got overlooked as being affected in rare circumstances after the color change. 

TheTabby I had an idea yesterday on this - the pills could change shape. The negative numbers be a large fat minus sign (or rectangle as you might call it) and the positive ones a big fat plus, a bit like the badge on a Chevrolet. If they want to get away from colours then shapes might be the solution?

Of course, I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but if colours aren't the answer, and apparently they aren't (although I don't know why they can't be an option - Excel lets me choose from about a hundred ways to show numbers) then maybe shapes?

TheTabby lindsay_g

Thank you for sharing your ideas! We do want to move away from colors as the ultimate tell-tale sign in the budget and I like those suggestions! We've had to backpedal a bit to address the issues caused by the initial color changes but we are still keeping the long term goal in mind. :)

Slate Gray Inspector Sorry for the scare here! We don't intend to remove colors, we just don't want them to be the only indicator for what's taking place in your categories. We use red and green to send signals about Available amounts, which isn’t the ideal experience for anyone with red-green color blindness. As a part of some larger visual changes, we’re looking at how to send these signals in ways that don’t rely on color at all but that doesn't mean color won't be present.

We're working on a fix to move in the right direction for those with color blindness this time. We're hoping to have those improvements live soon!

Ivory Sander Please email us at [email protected] and we can make sure you're put on our contact list for the coming changes!

Hi George Peden !

Our CPO, Todd, mentioned writing a piece on this occurrence in the coming week. I do want to add in that we use feature flags and incremental roll outs - most times. We released this feature outside of our usual manner, thinking it was in the best interest of all YNABers, and quickly learned otherwise.

We do apologize for the inconvenience and we appreciate your patience as we learned through this one! :) 

Faness Yikes. Hopefully they have learned their lesson about deviating from accepted practices, and I'm sorry it has been so much of an additional burden on the front-line support staff. Looking forward to things getting back to more normal for you soon!

bevocat Thank you for your kind words! We've all learned a few things from this and we hope to keep any similar offenses from occurring going forward! :)

Faness Super!  software is hard :-)