CompTIA Data+ DA0-002 (V2) Practice Question

Your team is building a revenue dashboard for senior leadership. One bar chart compares Year-to-Date revenue for five product lines. Company branding guidelines specify navy (#002B5C) as the primary color and provide four complementary accent colors approved for communications. In the first draft the analyst colored the five bars with progressively lighter tints of navy. During user testing several viewers said the bars looked too similar to distinguish quickly, and one color-blind reviewer reported difficulty seeing any difference at all. The analyst must keep the chart visually on-brand but improve categorical discrimination.

Which design change is the most appropriate?

Replace the palette with a red-to-green diverging scale to maximize visual contrast between high and low revenue.
Keep all bars navy, varying only their opacity and add a gradient legend explaining the shades.
Render every bar in neutral gray and rely on direct data labels above each bar for identification.
Apply a qualitative palette that keeps one bar in navy and colors the other four bars with the approved accent hues so each product has a distinct, high-contrast color.

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Answer Description

Product lines are discrete categories, so the chart needs a qualitative palette in which each bar has its own distinct hue of similar luminance. Applying the four brand-approved accent colors alongside the core navy keeps the visualization on-brand while giving every product a clearly distinguishable color that meets contrast and color-blind-accessibility guidelines. Using only lighter tints of navy is a sequential scheme meant for ordered, not categorical, data and will still be hard to tell apart. A red-to-green diverging scale discards brand identity and incorrectly suggests a positive-negative meaning. Rendering all bars gray eliminates corporate colors and forces readers to rely solely on text labels, adding unnecessary cognitive load.

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