A Budget That’s Easy On The Eyes

At YNAB, our success is ultimately measured by yours—taking control of your money, paying off your debt, sleeping well at night. We aim to help through the content we provide and the apps we build—but that only works if those tools are accessible to everyone. It’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about the recent refresh of our website, or providing transcripts for our new Debt Stories Podcast.

Over the last year, we’ve made a few small changes to the Available amounts to make them more accessible, as well. We added visual signals to the Available amounts to make it clear whether there was credit overspending or an underfunded goal. We also increased the size of the negative sign for overspent categories. Both of these changes help users with visual impairments easily scan their budget by relying less on a color-based signal.

Today, we’re introducing some changes to the colors themselves used in the Available column.

What’s changed? We significantly increased the contrast between the color of the background (the “pill”) and the text, while muting the background color. These changes increase the contrast in general, which makes the text easier to read for everyone.

We’re not done yet.

This is a very small change, and is coming first only to the web app. While this helps with readability, we still 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. We’re also planning on increasing readability through increased type sizes, especially in the mobile apps, where text is simply too small, while also improving color combinations and contrast in general. Those changes aren’t quite ready, but that doesn’t mean we need to wait for a small change like this.