My business model is to offer customers a trial period after which they subscribe to the app. This can be awkward “jiggling” Pro licences (which they all need) but it is workable. To date I have only had one customer not proceed, however today I have another. Both are due to Glide charting.
Despite numerous positive comments about the app, it seems that the small (but key) ability to control chart colours has bitten me again. The customer says “We will need the charts to be less confusing as it is important for the information displayed to be consistent. At the moment the chart colours do not match the feedback colours and also change around from time to time”.
The issue they have is that the pie charts are used to show a breakdown of user feedback and feedback can be red, amber or green. It is not possible to control pie chart colours and so often red feedback may be shown as green on the chart! Additionally the chart colours for a specific feedback category (i.e. one pie slice) can also change because I think the theme’s “first colour” is used for the highest number?
I know that I have asked before but I am extremely keen to get this customer on-board. Has anybody found a way to address this? Is there anything in the works from the Glide Team (@Mark?) that I could suggest is “coming down the line”?
Ok, this is also a significant issue in my app. We survey employees using a 5 point Likert scale and cannot assign a consistent chart color to each choice, very, very confusing. My app will have a whopping 320+ charts in it. Please please let us assign the color to the choice so the even if the largest response displays at the top, you’re able to visually process by learning a consistent color association. Not a good user experience at the moment.
Hey @Deena I’m so glad it’s not just me. The charts in Glide are really great in terms of ease of use and the perceived value they can add to an app. But my users want consistency, just like yours. This is rapidly accelerating to the very top of my “need it please” list!
I faced a similar issue when creating a chart for my Orders Management template.
I wanted to show the number of order units by order status.
Because this data is split by orders, and by person the order is assigned to, there was no way to control the order of Order Status when aggregating the data by Order Status.
I assigned each Order Status a number (to indicate order), pulled that number in the Orders sheet, and then sorted the data behind the Chart by this order.
This way, the order is the same, the colors are also the same for each order status.
For your case, because we don’t have the control over which stack is assigned which color, you need to order your statuses by the Color order in the Chart component.
Can you please share an example of your chart, and how you would color it? We have to take a systematic approach to this because the charts don’t know how many bars they have, or which ones they are. Some charts do not have a 1-1 correspondence to rows either, like the pie chart.
Users can submit daily feedback that includes an option for better, same or worse. In the UI these are coloured green, amber and red respectively, reflecting the “industry standard” RAG reporting scenario. A chart is required that shows, across a given time period, the numbers of green, amber and red feedbacks. A pie chart would be most suitable, however it is currently not possible to ensure that a given colour of feedback is consistently the same colour in the corresponding chart segment, let alone ensure that the colours match the feedback. Inconsistency confuses the user.
CHART EXAMPLE 2:
Users can submit daily feedback that includes a pain level from 1 - 10. A chart is required that shows pain level over time. A line chart would be most suitable but we can use a bar chart with a bar for each day, however they should all be the same colour in order to simply show the trend. Differing colours confuse the user as they infer a different meaning rather than just a daily total.
A possible solution that would cover both scenarios might be additional chart options like this:
Use a theme (per current mechanism) to auto assign colours
Use a single colour (would handle the bar)
Use fixed colours for the first “X” chart segments (would handle the pie)
Alternatively, if the charts are effectively using “data series” behind the scenes, then the options could be:
Use a theme (per current mechanism) to auto assign series colours
Use a fixed colour per series (assumes a pie uses a series per segment and a bar is a single series)
It would also be fabulous to have an option to completely hide the “i” indicator as it makes no sense for the user to see the raw data in certain scenarios (e.g. the bar above).
Obviously plenty of other options too, but I agree that it needs thinking about. I bow to your greater judgement, but hopefully the use cases make some sense.
When you sell an app to a client, we transfer it either to the client’s Glide account, or to another org that you control where the app can be billed normally. We cannot sell unlimited Pro apps for a fixed fee (e.g. $99/mo), so you must graduate apps to our normal, non-agency pricing when they’re ready for prime time.
Unlimited app transfers to clients