How Color Can Affect The Usability Of An App And Website

Melissa Crooks
Product Coalition
Published in
4 min readMar 3, 2020

--

https://images.pexels.com/photos/326503/pexels-photo-326503.jpeg

Color is a tool that designers often use in their designs. There is a possibility that they mainly use black and white that, in theory, are not considered colors, but it is likely that in a large part of their projects they will have to consider two or more colors.

Color has a great impact on users because it can convey feelings and, together with typography, help generate a certain environment in design. With color, you can reinforce the personality of the brand and the message that you want to communicate through the design.

Apart from the psychological aspect that colors have, there are other factors that you must take into account when selecting a combination of colors such as the personality of the brand and the level of contrast.

Contrast is a characteristic that is present in various elements that are part of a design. Due to contrast, you can create a varied design. In the case of color, contrast not only implies adding variety, but also clarity to the design. In this article, we explain the relationship between color and web usability.

Readability of text and other elements

When choosing a color palette for a website, not only is it usually decided on the HEX code but also a type of use is associated with the pages. For these uses, there is always a background color that should have a contrast with the other colors used in the design. There must be a high contrast between the background color and the colors of the foreground elements, especially if it is text.

By ensuring that there is a good contrast between the selected colors, you can greatly improve the readability of all the elements, mainly of the texts. Your users can read and identify texts easily and without major difficulties.
To choose colors properly, it is not only advisable to know color theory and use tools that help you create color combinations, but you also need to perform tests to verify if the elements are readable.

Shocking colors on CTA buttons

Although the contrast is usually more clearly noted in texts since the readability of the words or paragraphs is easily evaluated, it can also be evaluated in other elements. Although various elements are of great importance on a website, the call-to-action buttons are those that directly guide users to perform the desired task and are related to the conversion of the website.

Several factors affect the probability of clicks of a call-to-action button such as location and size. The crucial feature is that these buttons must be completely visible and capture the attention of your users. For this reason, there must be an appropriate contrast between the background and the elements that are part of the call-to-action button. In this case, you should take into account the fill color of the button, the texts and the background color of the page to regulate the level of contrast between all these colors.

One of the best options is to opt for complementary colors. This means choosing colors that are in opposite positions in the color wheel.

Contrast level between colors

Contrast is present in all color combinations. This level of contrast is not adequate in some cases and can affect the readability of certain elements.

Complementary colors do not always work in all possible situations. In many cases, you cannot use this type of color combination because you must take into account the visual identity and personality of the brand. Although it is a great benefit for you to know about color theory, the best action you can take is to select colors and perform small tests to verify the contrast of that color combination in different elements of your website.

You can use the knowledge about color theory to more easily create effective color combinations. Remember that you have at your disposal a series of tools that help you in this task and even have web pages dedicated to inspiring you about color. It is also likely that you have your library of images and color combinations that you use as a reference and inspiration.

In conclusion

Creating effective color combinations can be a real headache. There are several factors to consider about the brand, the message, the target audience, as well as the relationships between colors. However, you must learn to select and create color palettes because, as you have already seen, color plays an important role in the projects handled by web developers and designers.

You should also consider how color not only affects users on a psychological level but in what ways it can damage readability and web usability in general. So you should not only choose colors that look good but check that the elements of the site can be displayed correctly in their new colors.

Author Bio:

Melissa Crooks is a Content Writer who writes for Hyperlink InfoSystem, one of the leading app development companies in New York, USA & India that holds the best team of skilled and top app developers. She is a versatile tech writer and loves exploring the latest technology trends, entrepreneur and startup column. She also writes for top app development companies.

--

--