How Colors Can Decide The Success of Your Website/Apps.
Colors play a vigorous role in the world we live in. They are essential to every part of our life. Colors can distract thinking, change actions, and cause reactions. They can annoy or calm your eyes, increase blood pressure, or even suppress hunger. Hence it can be easily said that colors embrace the power to influence our emotions. Ever imagined a black and white life? It is hard to live in one, isn’t it?
Colors are used to show and carry information. If you look at the Color Scheme of any Dashboard Design for Graphs, colors are there to form meaning and sense in the data it displays
If the Color scheme of your Website or Mobile App Design is not appropriate, users can simply misinterpret your message. Colors attract and repel everyone in this world. Each Color scheme you insert have some psychological and emotional effect on the users.
Colors affect us on different levels and that is why we all have our own choices. The power that colors hold also influence our buying decisions as consumers. Brands are very conscious of this and make use of colors deliberately to interact with the audience.
The same theory applies to a website or an application, where in you can influence your audience both positively as well as negatively by using correct or incorrect colors. Therefore, it is important to understand the psychology behind colors so that we can tactically use them to suggest the desirable emotions.
Colors & emotions
There is no denial that colors are directly connected to our emotions. There are plenty of phrases to show what way colors can affect your mood. Few common ones, such as: Feeling blue? Green with envy? I just see red reading political news. This is not black-and-white for me. As these idioms suggest, some colors make us happy, relaxed or calm, while others makes us hungry, angry, excited, or energized. Hence, it is crucial that we think through what colors we are going to use in our design. Colors mainly command what message is sent out to the audience.
Let us understand this notion with the help of a few examples: If we are designing a food app or workout app, the color scheme should be warm such as red or orange because these colors remind appetite & active emotions, . At the same time if we are working on a yoga or meditation app, blue or green can be preferred choice to show relaxed & calm emotions. While designing our products we need to see who the target audience is and understand what colors are going to affect them positively and then make a choice.
Contrast
The best sign of a great user interface is when users find it easy to navigate and interact with. If there are any inadequacies in the interface, users are quick to reject the product. Let us understand why users abandon any products. 7 out of 10 times, it is because of usability problems. An example of poor contrast is the text is not being legible or the content not being clear enough. Poor contrast of text ends up in poor readability that may prompt our users to leaving the website or app.
The good news is that we can fix most usability issues simply by getting the contrast right. Look at the example below. Maintaining visual contrast & hierarchy is crucial because it motivates users to come back to your interface that eventually builds brand trust. When correctly used it also creates a brand recall value. Don’t we want our brand to stand out in the crowd?
Conclusion
So far, we learnt how colors affect our emotions, how each color represents a multitude of emotions & what should be considered while picking colors for our product. A simple tip: choose your colors smartly & wisely to build users’ trust. However, do not get overwhelmed with colors, consider your target audience before designing. Use a color combination that works best for your product. Test it out with users to capture their real-time feedback. Find out what emotions your users feel.
