Design around audience
expectations
When it comes to selecting the ‘best’
colour for a brand, research has found
that predicting consumer sentiment
toward the relevance of a colour and a
brand is more important than the colour
selection itself.
For example, when thinking of health,
many people correlate that to the colour
green. If a new health initiative for
a large organisation or food product
decided to brand themselves with bright
red, something would feel off about that
choice. We may not always consciously
realise why it feels that way but behind
the scenes that feeling is our brain’s
way of filtering through what aligns
with past experiences that were
learned or conditioned. This
is even more apparent in
colour choices.Much like in UX, it’s important to
consider how jarring things that don’t
match user expectations can be.
In 2003, Joe Hallock wrote an
undergraduate paper on colour
assignment. He surveyed a sample size
of 232 people and was able to distil core
colour associations by gender and age.
For example, he was able to determine
that the emotional resonance of trust
correlated mostly to blue (34 per cent of
all survey participants).
Again, whether you personally feel
blue best represents trust or not isn’t the
focus. There were plenty of others that
felt white (21 per cent) or green (11 per
cent) conveyed trust. When designing for
larger audiences or market segments, we
want to assess the ideal customer over
anyone else’s personal bias. If you are
Microsoft and you’d like to position Bing
in the marketplace to imply trust, you
look at it as a numbers game. Internet
Live Stats suggests there are over 3.5
billion searches per day on Google; it has
a market share of about 93 per cent of all
searches (https://netm.ag/2FIurFM).
If Microsoft is looking to gain
more of a market share, a focal
point of that effort may be“Predicting
consumer sentiment
toward a colour and a
brand is more important
than the colour
selection itself”
establishing trust through design and
branding. According to a recent survey
facilitated by SurveyMonkey, 65 per
cent of all participants said that trust
influences either a lot or a great deal inBelow When Slack overhauled
its brand identity, it did such a
good job that other companies
soon copied its lookBelow Using a tool such as UX Triggers
(http://uxtriggers.com) will help you break
down the colour psychology of your productFEATURES
Use colour to shape UX