The day a user told me "the running site looks weak" — rebuilding the three-state visual hierarchy with background color

After we'd shipped the colored borders for in-maintenance and completed sites on the multi-site list, real-world usage produced an unexpected report: "the running site somehow looks weak." Followed by: "the green border that's supposed to stick for 24 hours doesn't show up." The first one was surprising. The running site has a pulsing blue border — it should be obvious. But when I looked at the screen again, yes, it did look weak relative to its neighbors. The problem turned out not to be the running-state color itself, but a hierarchy among the three states that had quietly inverted. This post walks through that visual-hierarchy collapse and rebuild, along with the "design oscillation" we'd accidentally introduced one round earlier. At a glance, "running" looked weaker than "pending" The multi-site list has three states: Pending — sites queued up to be processed next Running — the site currently being processed Completed — sites finished within the last 24h