eLearning Design and Color Psychology Unraveling the Connection

According to science, color plays a significant function in aiding human learning by influencing vision and triggering various emotions. Understanding how to utilize colors in eLearning design for better digital training is something that every instructional designer should know because Learning and Development (L&D) and Instructional Design are entirely built on guiding employees to learn better through psychological triggers. Let’s look at color psychology, or how colors affect a person’s mind before we get some advice on employing color in your design.

The Psychology of Color

When a person looks at an object, the eye registers the object’s color and sends a signal to the brain’s hypothalamus. The pituitary and thyroid glands, in turn, send signals to the hypothalamus, which secrete substances that influence a person’s behavior. Colors have such an impact on people’s behavior that 60 percent to 90 percent of how they engage with an object is governed by color. Marketing departments in businesses have long used color psychology, and now it’s time for instructional designers to take advantage of it.

Different colors and their use in businesses

Every color has a sensation or a state of mind linked with it, and designers must know about these associations to employ them in their digital learning design. However, these color connections should be taken with a grain of salt and should not be seen as hard and fast rules. Color interpretation is heavily influenced by personal tastes, experiences, cultural differences, upbringing, and circumstances. The following are some general color associations discovered to elicit specific emotions in humans.

• Blue: Blue is a popular business color because it represents trust, calm, order, and loyalty. Blue should never be used with food because it suppresses appetite.
• Orange: Orange is related to a sense of urgency, as well as a sense of playfulness. Orange is a bold but appealing color, which is why eCommerce retailers utilize it on their “Add to Cart” buttons. It can persuade students to click a button in digital learning.
• Black: Black has always been linked with richness, sophistication, elegance, and timelessness, and it exudes a timeless vibe. Brands that sell high-end things make use of it. Because black is such a prevalent color for text, getting the proper tone of black is crucial in instructional design.

Moving on .

• White: White, once again, is a popular color, and it is connected with openness, freedom, and majesty. White goes nicely with other colors to emphasize the emotions they evoke.
• Yellow: Yellow is associated with happiness, joy, and playfulness and is consequently utilized by brands who want customers to link them with pleasure, such as toy companies, candy companies, food companies, adventure sports companies, and so on. Yellow can also draw attention to something, which is why traffic signals utilize it.
• Green: Nature, creativity, and calm are all connected with the color green. Organizations that want to be associated with nature and the environment typically employ it. Green is also connected with safety and activities, so it can be used as a Call-To-Action in e learning management system.

Color Has Its Advantages In Marketing, Web, and eLearning Design

Color is vital in marketing because it can help a brand stand out and improve traffic or money, not only because consumers have personal color preferences that can influence how they perceive a company, but also because it can help a brand stand out and generate traffic or revenue. This conversation will be focused on website design and how color may assist increase traffic, direct a user around a website, influence consumer perception, and differentiate amongst competitors.

The color scheme of a website establishes the brand and sets the tone for the entire user experience. Colors must be picked for all aspects of the website, including:

• Type of headline
• Borders
• Backgrounds and textures
• Buttons
• Popups
• Giveaways and promotions
• Navigation and menus
• Sidebars
• Registration and sign-up forms
• A call to action

The primary goals of selecting colors for a website are to highlight the brand and its general mood, as well as to increase conversion and sales. Your colors should complement your branding identity kit. A good example is using a contrasting color to draw attention to the call to action. People are more inclined to remember products that stand out, so having your CTA aka call to action stand out with a pop of color will encourage customers to click on it and continue browsing the website. Primary colors are a good choice in this case because brilliant primary and secondary colors convert the best.

Ensure that the colors you pick are apt for the current color scheme. Rather than modifying the entire scheme to fit a new call-to-action color, shades of primary or secondary colors may be better suited to the current scheme.

How Can You Embed Color Psychology in eLearning Design?

Let’s examine what colors can be used for now that you know what they’re related to.

• Lessen boredom and passivity (red)
• Enhance mental activity (yellow)
• Minimize confusion with blue
• Soothe learners’ eyes (green)
• Increase employees’ attention span (warm colors)
• Pay close attention to a certain point (bright colors)
• Enhance readability (contrasting colors)
• Improve employees’ understanding and learning (as opposed to black and white)
• Enhance learners’ memory (color images)
• Create a relaxing atmosphere (warm colors are stimulating, while cool colors are calming)

Utilize colors to help them become attentive

Color can aid improve attention spans by reducing boredom and apathy. Recall rates and reaction times improve when students pay more attention during learning. Numerous studies have discovered that when developers utilize colors to accentuate a specific feature or piece of content on the screen, for example, learners’ attention levels rise. Warm hues are the most effective in achieving this goal. When utilized correctly, red jumps out and attracts attention right away, stimulating the visual sense and aiding learners in remembering information and figures.

Make smart usage of vivid colors

When creating eLearning content, eLearning designers should utilize strong and vivid colors sparingly or over neutral backdrop tones. This prevents colors from becoming excessively strong and attracting attention in multiple directions, which would render the approach ineffective. As a result, colors should be bold rather than brilliant (which is difficult to see) and solids rather than neons (which appear unprofessional).

Enhance readability with clever color palettes

For two reasons, color can improve text clarity and readability by as much as 40%. First, when developers deliberately employ color on every screen to boost content clarity, they instantly make concepts more logical, which aids reasoning and memory. Second, color can improve the readability of the material. This is best accomplished by using contrasting chromatic hues in the text and background of eLearning course screens. To locate contrasting colors, use a color wheel.

• Black on yellow and green on white are the most legible color combinations, followed by red on white.
• On paper and on computer screens, black on white is the simplest to read.
• Hard colors (red, orange, and yellow) stand out more and make objects appear bigger and closer. They’re easy to concentrate on.
• Colors that are less visible (violet, blue, and green) make objects appear smaller and farther away. They’re not as easy to concentrate on.

Improve learner retention

People remember colors better than verbal or textual clues alone because color connects neuropathways; for example, The Institute for Color Research confirmed that color can boost learning by up to 78 percent and comprehensive by up to 73 percent. People recall colored images more than black and white images, according to other studies. Most participants examined could recall more images if they were colorful rather than black and white, according to this.

eLearning developers should employ colors with much greater meaning when creating each screen in order to take advantage of this information; for example, using color-coding to boost learning. Learners will identify the color with the concepts if you use a colorful background on displays displaying facts and concepts, for example. This will assist students to remember the material. This color labeling system is very useful for highly technical subjects. Know more: learning management system

Decode the meaning of colors and use them

You can consider hue connotations while building eLearning courses. Those who dispute the premise that every color has a specific meaning can also make use of the same. This is because students may, consciously or unconsciously, consider the significance of color. Color meanings vary by culture, therefore designers should select appropriate tones based on their target audience’s culture and individual qualities. For example, in Western society, red denotes danger or importance, black denotes negativity, white denotes purity, blue denotes waterbodies, and green denotes flora.

Some more examples

In an academic atmosphere, colors have learned causes as well. Red, for example, frequently indicates a blunder, whilst blue, on the other hand, may indicate openness. Red can help learners do better on detail-oriented activities like memory retrieval and attention to detail, but it won’t help them stay on task and concentrate for long periods of time. In tasks like brainstorming, however, blue generates twice as much creative production as red.

eLearning designers can also use color meanings to create a learning mood, which will affect performance. Green, blue, and violet produce a peaceful learning environment, whereas red, orange, and yellow create a high-energy, stimulated course.

Select the appropriate color combinations

Developers, new to eLearning design, often choose colors based on their own personal tastes and preferences. The color wheel is a basic and useful component of color theory. This demonstrates which colors are complementary and aids developers in creating a color scheme that does not strain learners’ eyes. The color wheel comprises six primary colors: red, yellow, green, blue, orange, and purple, as well as their combinations. Any two shades that are opposite each other, any trio of hues that are evenly placed to create a triangle, and any four colors that form a rectangle are all harmonic. Read more: Corporate learning

Conclusion

If you follow color psychology, you can employ diverse combinations of colors to influence learners in different ways via your eLearning design. If you have just started with color psychology in your classes, don’t use more than three tones. Of course, you’ll get better with practice. And remember to utilize colors in a 60:30:10 ratio rather than all three in equal amounts. To get a better understanding of what colors to pick for your courses, read up on color psychology and color theory.