Having said that, I always try to include a small amount of saturation in my greys - pure grayscale colors don’t exist in nature, and seem unnatural to users (although if that’s what you’re going for it’s not a problem).įor Doctoroo, I chose a contrasting yellow that was bright and saturated to lend the app a more friendly feeling. I never use two colors that are highly saturated together - this often just makes people’s eyes tired. This diagram explains the general perception of colors depending on their saturation and brightness: The screen on the left uses one saturated color because there’s only one function (booking an appointment), whereas the screen on the right is designed for doctors who need to be able to look through a patient’s allergies and visit history, which is why I used mostly desaturated colors.
I tend to use less saturated colors when I want users to focus on complicated or thought-intensive tasks, and stronger colors when they have one main function to complete. The more saturated (intense) a color is, the more it attracts attention. Remember, the product will use a range of methods to convey information and hierarchy (size, layout/position, font, proximity, etc.), of which color is only one. I tend to use a very limited palette - one or two primary colours that work well together, perhaps one more color for accents, and then a range of subtler shades of grey. You shouldn’t use too many colors - stick to a small number that the average person can take in with one glance. I chose blue for Doctoroo mostly because that’s what users expect from a medical app. When choosing the primary color, it’s more important to consider how your audience will react to the color choice than the color itself. It’s nearly meaningless to say “red means passion”, or that any color translates to a specific emotion (not to mention this kind of statement has hardly any scientific evidence supporting it). Instead, personal taste, life experiences, cultural considerations, and a host of other factors affect how an individual perceives a color. My second step was to come up with a primary color - everything else would be based on this.Ĭontrary to what a lot of design resources say (and what I thought for a long time), most colors don’t evoke hyper-specific emotions. To generate your own list, ask yourself: does the product need to be perceived as friendly? Robust? Professional? Cutting-edge? Futuristic? or perhaps more down-to-earth? If you’re stuck, think about who the product is being designed for and what you’d like them to think or say when they use the finished version. These never really play directly into the color choices, but serve as guidelines. Typically, I start by coming up with some adjectives that describe the product and the brand values I’d like it to portray.
Doctoroo is a medical app for Android which enables users to book video calls and arrange appointments with doctors. I’m going to use an app I designed recently, Doctoroo, as an example to demonstrate the different steps I took and why. When I'm designing a new interface, the principal considerations for the color palette are: the user demographics, where and how the product will be used, and any company branding guidelines. But, choosing it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Did you know that it only takes 90 seconds for a user to make a judgement about a digital product? Interestingly for us as designers, most of this judgement is based on color.Ĭoming up I’ll give some tips on how to find colors that work together, how you can test them, and finally some handy tools.Ĭhoosing a color palette for your app could be considered the most important part of an app’s visual design, strongly affecting the user’s perception of the quality of the product.
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