Color greatly impacts people’s perception and attitude toward an object, be it a painting, a website, or a commercial. Here are a couple of quick facts:
- It takes less than 2 minutes for a new visitor to assess your web resource.
- The color palette forms 90% of the first impression.
- When users are asked to recollect what they saw, color is the first thing they talk about.
Thus, the choice of colors is a strategically important activity that can determine the success or failure of your product redesign process. UX/UI designers use colors to amplify the effect of their design solutions and pass the message across to users. This is how you can achieve great effects with a UX/UI design and carefully selected colors.
Color and Emotion
You might be wondering how color can create an emotional impression. It’s all simple; the color palette contains warm, cold, and neutral colors, each of which comes with specific associations. For instance:
- Green is the color of freshness, nature, and health.
- Silver is the color of high-tech innovation.
- Pink comes with an association with childhood, feminine motifs, and candies.
- Yellow is a great attention-grabber, so it’s a favorite choice for CTA buttons.
These are just a couple of examples of how colors work in design. However, the associations we’ve just mentioned work almost universally among people. So, you need to weigh your chosen colors’ emotional and associative content with the brand identity before proceeding to UI/UX design.
Using Color to Appeal to Different Socio-Demographic Groups
UX/UI designer efforts make a web resource usable and appealing to a target audience. To achieve that effect, you need to know who your target users are and what socio-demographic characteristics they possess. Research shows that men and women like different colors and different age groups also have distinct color preferences. So, matching your brand colors with the target users’ preferences is critical to achieving continuity.
- Age is a strong determinant of color preferences. Large-scale studies have shown that people like long-wavelength colors in childhood and at a young age (e.g., yellow, orange, red) but tend to short-wavelength colors as they grow old (e.g., blue, green, or violet). This tendency is explained by more energy and brightness in adolescence that declines with age. Thus, colors that can attract young people will cause nothing but irritation in users of older age.
- Gender affects color preferences as well. Men favor brightness and contrast over pastel combinations and women like more delicate colors.
- Cultural identity is another significant determinant of color choices. There are various cultural associations with colors, such as white being the color of purity and innocence in the West and symbolizing mourning and death in Asia. The yellow color should also be used with discretion, as it’s the royal color forbidden for common people in many Asian countries. Red, on the contrary, is overused in Asian web design, though Western designers prefer to use red minimally to avoid an aggressive feel.
The 60-30-10 Rule of Palette Design
Now that you know the principles and symbolism behind the color choice, it’s time to design a winning color palette for your UX/UI design. Experts recommend using several colors (unless you’re planning a monochrome resource) and combining them in line with the 60-30-10 rule:
- 60% of space is dedicated to a primary color (it’s better to pick a neutral color for this purpose).
- A supplementary color is given 30% of the space.
- The third color, a brighter one for accents and CTA buttons, is given 10% of the website space.
This way, you experiment with color combinations by sticking to safer, neutral colors and changing the bright colors to see the effect on the users. Picking the unique color palette that gives you an intended emotional appeal and communicates your brand identity is a winning outcome of such efforts.
Amplifying the UX Hierarchy with Color
Color can also help you attract the user’s attention to specific page parts. This way, you can affect what they see and do on your resource by coloring the CTAs and action buttons with bright, attractive colors. It can become way easier to improve user experience by giving visitors what they want with intuitive, color-labeled UIs.
Color and Conversion
You might also be surprised that color choices can affect your website’s conversion – the most desirable metric of your resource. Using colors that sell is not a secret recipe for success; it’s a matter of practice and wise color choices. Choose a bright and pleasant color for CTA buttons and ensure they align with other colors in the brand palette.
Another bonus of using color psychology in UI/UX design is the ability to make your resource more readable and accessible overall. The only thing you need to do is mind the color blindness of some users and improve readability with properly contrasted colors.
How to Find Out Which Colors Your Users Like?
Now that you’ve stepped on the path of amplifying the UI/UX efforts with color psychology, it’s time to find out what your users like. This can be achieved with a simple user survey that you can launch online or ask your website visitors. Include some of these questions to form a color profile of your audience:
- What did you expect the website would look like before you visited it? Is the website look different from what you expected to see?
- Where did you click first? What made you do so?
- How did this website/app make you feel? Rate the impression from 1 (very unpleasant) to 5 (very appealing).
- Do you feel trust toward the brand?
- What brands do you know with a similar appearance?
Key Takeaways
The color goes much farther than simple esthetics in web design. Different colors evoke a wide spectrum of emotions, from warmness and trust to disgust and irritation. Thus, you should consider color choices thoroughly to avoid spoiling your website’s UX. Check the color palette to see whether your chosen colors match well; consider your target audience’s color preferences. It all contributes to your resource’s usability and adoption.
