Research: Psychology of Colour

After the crit on Friday, I decided that it would be good for me to research more the colours that I may use in my application, in order for it to have a stronger link and be more effective to use for the users.


Green: Green is good for concentration as it's a colour that "promotes restfulness and calm" therefore it helps us to become efficient and focus more.

Blue: According to my research the usage of the colour blue for highly intellectual work is effective for productivity, especially when paired with a warmer colour/tone on the opposite side of the colour wheel.

Red: can stimulate energy, however depending on the intensity it can appear threatening. Although, when paired with repetitive or detail-orientated tasks it helps improve focus.

Yellow: can evoke happiness but if overdone it may lead to feeling of stress or warning instead.

Orange: stimulate critical thinking and memory. It increases oxygen supply to the brain and stimulate mental activity and is highly accepted among young people.

Purple: often associated with royalty, class, power; pairing it with a contrasting colour like yellow will evoke a fun and easy attitude appropriate for children's products.

Black: A very versatile colour that it can fit into almost every design to add contrast, and make the other colour stand out.

White: evokes a clean, fresh and pure characteristics. Design wise, if used with a design with lots of negative space it can give the design a very sleek and clean look.

Thoughts & Reflection: 

After having a better understanding about colours in terms of their use for online design and learning I think that I'm going to make some changes my colour scheme in order to utilise these colours and help the users in learning and becoming more immersed in the application better. I think using green would be more effective in  terms of getting the users immersed in the application and making them use it more and learning in general s it may help them to focus especially as the application is quite information heavy and there's a lot of things that the users may find informative. Maybe using green as outlines or the application name colour will be effective in attracting users to it. I also liked the idea that the colour blue can be even more effective when used with an opposite colour. Going along with this, I thought of maybe using orange as well e.g. replacing the yellow highlighting colour to orange in order to stimulate memory and make the users remember the words/sentences better and more efficiently. In addition, from the crit, I've also got suggestions that maybe I should make the interface a bit more playful therefore I may customise the icons and symbols that I'm using using these colours in order to evoke a fun character to such an information heavy application where users may find it boring and intensive.

https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/how-do-colors-influence-learning
https://www.td.org/insights/how-color-can-affect-learning