At other franchises, this is a solved problem. Hot Donuts Now.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hot+donuts+now&client=safari...

Note that these signs use a red light to indicate the availability of a breakfast food, serving as prior art for the Ham Biscuit sign coloring.

> Note that these signs use a red light

I wonder if they're incidentally red by virtue of 20th Century designers choosing neon light tubes for their ability to be physically formed in the shape of the words? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_lighting

"Neon was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers. The characteristic, brilliant red color that is emitted by gaseous neon when excited electrically was noted immediately"

Twitter should have read this article before releasing their UI update that caused the active state of the Follow/Following button to have the same background as the page itself - to this day, it continues to confuse me.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-follow-button-redesign

That said - Twitter's problem was that in a world where dark mode exists, it's indeed difficult to show an active state of a button while restricting yourself to white and black. Here, at least, the Ham Biscuit button is ham-colored, and when glowing it does somewhat resemble a piece of ham. So at the very least it has that going for it!

Assuming he wants to redesign it within the same basic constraints as the existing design, I would think that the message should be "ham biscuits sold out" rather than "ham biscuits available". That is, alert customers when you're sold out rather than before. The green light seems easy to miss, because green doesn't demand your attention as much as red does. Plus, the green sign is an example of one of my favorite anti-patterns, the "everything's okay!!!" alarm. Tell me when things go wrong, not when everything is working as I already expect it to.

You have a large flashing sign in someone's face and instead of using that as a sales tool ("buy a ham biscuit!", aka "hot donuts now!"), you're going to use it to tell them bad news?

If ham biscuits are regularly selling out, you don’t need to generate any more demand. It’s not like they can magically horizontally scale their ham biscuit production within the confines of a set kitchen.

A while back while on a business trip I stayed in hotel right across the street from a 24 hour Krispy Kreme donut shop. Every time their red neon “hot now” sign turned on it bathed my hotel room in a red glow. I ate a ton of hot glazed donuts that trip. Red works.

Some locations might not carry the ham biscuit. In such a case, the ham biscuits 'available' serves as advertisement in a sense. This is an overloading of the function of course, but perhaps a useful one.

I’d go with an always lit “HAM BISCUITS” and two signs below that say “AVAILABLE” and “SOLD OUT”, one lit and one dark, to be super explicit.

The problem with a green sign is that it might not stand out against a properly painted bike shed…

Or go with the old roadside motel "No Vacancy" sign model. Red neon letters, but the two words are on separate circuits. So you can have "Vacancy" lit when you have rooms, and then turn on "No" when you are full.

Red is also the best color to be readable at a distance, especially at night or in the rain.

I would stock enough ham biscuits to not run out of it.

Fixing the sign is a bandaid. Having a sign is a bandaid. I don't know what a ham biscuit is, maybe there is a reason why it's impossible to stock it properly. But clearly fixing that should be the first line of attack.

McD has two kinds of breakfast biscuits: premade and "scratch". Scratch is the original formula and is still used in some markets, like the ones selling country ham biscuits.

They're called "scratch" because they're hand made from a mix with buttermilk and then rolled out, cut, and baked in a convection oven on-site. It takes a while and running out is a thing that happens if they're not made fast enough.

I heard in some markets they have biscuits and gravy

Red for danger green for go. Red and absence of red is the problem if the language is colour then if needs to be tri-state:

  Red:   danger
  Green: go
  Black: bulb fail or system error

Colour choices are culturally defined.

What if a user is colour blind?

Railways worked on this. And yes, red/green is a concern. Railway signals can have 4 lights not 3, which allows for colourblind detection of bad states. In some ways, the 4th light is like a parity bit signal.

(I think the 4 light signal model is possibly indicating more states as well. Train drivers are tested for colour blindness)

His potential solution requires the customer to know that there are two states to the sign. An unlit “Ham biscuits available” with a white check next to it would be confusing to those able to read it. Although the legibility would be lower it’s not ideal.

Oh gosh I read this part

> Only by talking to people can we actually know the true scope of the issue.

and was hoping the author had managed to call a franchisee who had one of these signs and could publish the results of a 15min phone interview with them.

Easy things made complicated. They'd need the light saying "no more ham biscuits". Delegating the actual meaning to the light color or blinking status is just a call for wrong interpretation.