A common design language for small blinking lights?
The more devices I encounter that have unlabeled small blinking lights in various colors, the more I feel like we ought to have developed a standardized design language for what such lights mean by now.
In general, at least in the US, green lights indicate something positive and red lights indicate something negative. And a series of small adjacent lights often indicate things like charge levels; the more lit-up lights there are, the more charged the battery is.
But blue or purple lights, orange or amber or yellow lights, and white lights don’t seem to me to have standardized meanings. And steady lights sometimes mean something different from blinking lights of the same color. And slowly pulsing lights sometimes mean something different from rapidly blinking lights of the same color. And for some of us, some colors of lights can be hard to tell apart. And so on.
I feel like in general, the only way to find out what a given unlabeled light means on a given device is to look it up in the manual.
It’s not that I want every device to use precisely the same design; it’s just that I feel like wider general agreement on some basic principles would benefit users.