Bella consults

Being dogmatic is still my nature. And I continue to hate traffic-light colors. However, I do like the traffic-light elements of Summize. They display product ratings with multi-color bars. In the example 35 products associated with Flipper more often receive a top rating than products which contain the brightest name in the universe.

Even better: the grey-scale variant and sparklines. Sparklines visualize the number of ratings per month. The color represents the mean of all ratings for a month. Distinguishing different values is much easier with the grey-scale variant.

Being dog-matic is my nature. To use color appropriately is difficult. My suggestion is to avoid color. There are exceptions. In some cases color is an attribute of the object in question and not a means to code information:

Another successful example I like: