Question: We have a design for an app developed by an external agency and our business people seem to be happy with it. But it’s really terrible - the colours are too bright, the text is difficult to read and so on.

How can we persuade our business that it needs to be changed? We can’t just say “We don’t like it, it sucks.” We need to have valid points against this colour scheme.

I understand that colours are subjective. But are there any objective metrics that can show the difference between bad and good app colour scheme?

Answer: 
Your idea with a fade sounds good on paper, but if you found that it confuses people in certain situations, then I can think of several things:

* Remove the fade when the textbox is active, as you suggested, and TEST THIS IDEA on potential users.
* Consider not showing a fade at all. It's common text field behavior that text that is too long is cut off, and one can often tell from the content that it is cut off. Here's an example: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNTGt.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNTGt.png)
* If you expect this particular text field to hold long content, consider using a multiline field.
* You may also play with using a single line text field and expanding it into a multi-line one on click.
Make the input an obvious input for the user. Users no how it works and behaves.

When they are not editing the text, break text to a new line so the full text is visible. Truncating is annoying and often not needed.

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DGWwL.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DGWwL.png)

And when editing: (It's not a big issue that the input switches to a single line)

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D60gh.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D60gh.png)