Experiencing design is more than just how you interact with a particular site. It’s how the site makes you feel. This can be the result of great typography, imagery and colours. Today’s focus will by strictly on the use of colour and what that means to your user’s experience. Designers spend a significant amount of time determining what particular colours will generate the correct feeling for your site. Unfortunately, based on timing or the decisive powers of management, the correct colour palette for a site is often overlooked or misguided. I’ve been a victim of this in the past with clients having strong love for a particular colour. When a situation like this happens, be the strong voice in the room and show these individuals why they have to put their personal feelings and love of certain colours aside.
Say you want your audience to get a calm, trusting feeling while using your app, then you would want to use a palette based around the blue colour. Blue is one of the most commonly used colours around the web. It generates a feeling of credibility, focus and professionalism. It is most often seen with banks and businesses because of the feelings that it generates. We’ve seen this in our social apps as well. Take Facebook for example. It has always used a blue palette. Now it might not be the best example since Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted by the New York times as saying he is red-green colour blind so that’s why he picked blue as Facebook’s main colour since it is the richest colour to him. I ask though would Facebook be the same if it was all in green. I doubt it. The feelings that are generated from green colours are usually centered around the qualities of nature, organic and education.
If build a colour palette correctly then you have a stronger chance of gaining greater recognition and respect from your audience. If you continue to build on the trusting relationship with your audience through customer service, typography and all other aspects of the user experience then you will be able to connect even further with your audience. That first step though has to come from getting the set of colours right. Take Google for example, when you think of Google’s colour scheme, you immediately think of blue, light grey and burnt red. For a long time, Google didn’t keep this colour palette consistent from one app to another, but over the last few years, they’ve managed to realign their apps to fit this palette creating a stronger sense of trust. After all, our visual sense is our strongest developed sense. It is only natural that we would 90% of our assessment of products is based on colour so staying consistent is crucial.
Often we try to build excitement throughout a design by applying large type or snappy messages. You could avoid all of this just by using a colour that can trigger the right emotional sense within your audience. Say you have a buy now button on your site, you wouldn’t want to make it blue or purple, you would want to make it a red. Red offers a sense of excitement, youthfulness and has bold feelings. It’s a quick tip to helping increase your conversion. Remember though if you doesn’t necessarily use red, you can use tints or shades that will match your tone. In a recent study by HubSpot, they tested two different button colours. One was green and one was red. Remember green is a colour that signifies growth and movement. This seems like the obvious winner when wanting your audience to proceed forward. This is why traffic lights are green for go. In contrast, red usually means stop. It’s a warning, full of excitement and passion. Which do you think performed better for HubSpot? Surprisingly the red button by 21%. My guess is that the red button caused the audience to pause as they read down the page. It stood out more as a call to action than the green did. The green didn’t give the audience the right feeling for them to click on the button. It is important to note with this experiment that the entire rest of the page was kept the exact same. The button colours were the only thing that was changed.
Getting the tone right can have a huge impact into the overall emotional feeling your site offers. If you include fully saturated colours, your design will be more vibrate and full of energy. It can also look kind of Candylandish. In some cases, this might be too much. Users may feel rushed and slightly annoyed subconsciously. An example of an app that uses a beautiful colour scheme is MailChimp. Their colours are toned back and even though they use a range of colours, the app leaves you feeling that MailChimp is friendly, trusting and calming. You never feel like they are forcing you through the process of creating a email campaign.
KISSmetrics offers some advice when creating your colour palette. If your target is women, then using blue, purples and greens can go a long way to gaining their interest, but on the other side of this you want to avoid colours like orange, brown and grey. This changes when targeting men. If your audience is mostly men then colours like blue, green and black can be the best way to reach them. Picking the right colours can completely change the overall success of an app.
Spending time experimenting with colours for your next project can go along way to creating successful experiences with your audiences. Test your colour palettes out with controlled variable tests. See how these colours perform with users in contrast to other colours. Sometimes the results aren’t what you expect. Finally when you are starting a project, spend time discussing colours with your client. Show them how different colours cause different emotions. Remove your clients personal colour preferences from the table and focus on the ones that will connect best with your audience.
How have you used colour to increase conversions on your site?
