Importance of color choices in UI design
Color is a universal language that can be used to communicate different cultures, values, and ideas. Color psychology is well established in UI design. Color influences everything from mood and behavior to subconscious design decision-making. However, there is a way to make color an even more potent part of the user experience. How? By combining it with schemas. UI design wouldn’t be the same if everything were black and white. Color plays a role in everything from designing UI buttons to conveying emotion. However, using color as a language to communicate our brand is not as easy as it sounds. Once we embrace color as a communication tool, the normal rules of color psychology in your brand become more complicated.
A schema is defined by Merriam Webster as a mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli. In simpler terms, a schema is a collection of properties that our brain collects to create expectations of certain things. Thanks to schema, our brain is great at guessing what something is, even from just the color. This is relevant to UI design because we are always designing to improve experiences and surpass user expectations. When we relate to or challenge schemas, we are competing with a user's expectation of what a product should be like. Certain colors can influence certain moods, behaviors and thoughts. In design, marketers use colors to return a positive perception of their brand in order to increase conversion. Both schemas and color psychology are relevant to UI designers because they influence an experience. If designers have a good understanding of how color affects a user's mood, they're more likely to make their message stick.
Take a look at most web pages. The text is black, the background is white and there is a tendency to use san-serif fonts since we are naturally inclined to read them. When we are thinking about products, we can also easily relate color psychology to schemas. When we see red we expect a warning, yellow a hazard and white a neutral backdrop for other colors. But really this is just scratching the surface. Blindly following the normal color psychology isn't always the best way to make a memorable or delightful user experience. But this doesn't mean that color should be an afterthought. After carefully thinking through our brand's colors and making a choice, we will want to get it branded by using it everywhere. By using schemas, UI designers can ensure that brands don't get lost in the sea of sameness. For example, making sure the color of a Call to Action button is best suited to the type of action the user will carry out. Google's material design reinforces this use of color schemas in their guidelines.
In order to start developing a color scheme throughout our brand, the final piece of the puzzle is to consider the context of the application of the product. A prime example could be a gardening product based on the color of the things you may find in the user's garden. By using a base range of colors that relate to different aspects of the garden's personality, we can design in accordance with our brand and target user base. This can either be done by challenging existing environmental schemas, by choosing a contrasting color, or by relating to the existing schemas and choosing colors that can relate. It's easy to choose between the two when we know your brand's core message. Once we have considered the brand, color psychology and existing schemas, color can start to choose itself. By testing this against the context of application, our brand will be using color as part of the design language.
Color psychology is based on our existing schemas that encourage certain emotional responses. So on a surface level, it's easy to use color to induce these emotional responses in our designs. On a deeper level, color can mean so much more to someone. Color design can have lasting effects on a user's relationship with a product or brand. With an effective color strategy, we can ultimately define our own design language. Application and use cases can act as filters for color in order to define design language and the brand.