I confess, I’ve long been sceptical of the “make your website/buy button x colour and people will trust/like you” approach to design.

This scepticism has been fuelled by 2 things:

(1) Split-tests I’ve run across many sites where we compared one colour to another – and found no “one-size-fits-all results.
(2) The inability of the colour theorists to provide hard evidence – i.e. multiple split-test results – to support their theories.

Of course, colour makes a difference. If you test one colour scheme against another, you’re going to see a difference in conversion rates. The question is can you reliably predict which colour scheme will win?

I suspect not.

Predictable results from using colour

However, I do believe colour can be used to create predictable results – in 3 ways:

#1: Using colour contrast to direct the visitor’s attention to key elements on the page. This is the graphical equivalent of bolding sections of your copy, or using subheads.

#2: By taking advantage of web conventions. An example would be blue underlined links (like you’ll see lower in this post). Web users know that blue underlined text is a link.

If you use other colour schemes for your links – or don’t underline – you’re asking the visitor to figure out it’s a link. And, as a result, the link is less likely to be clicked on.

Similarly, buttons that look like buttons are likely to get clicked on more often.

#3: Taking advantage of the “familiarity effect”. In his book, “Influence”, Robert Cialdini showed that people tend to like and trust things that are familiar.

Most of your customers are familiar with Amazon’s “add to basket” button. If your basket button looks similar, you can piggyback (even in a small way) on that trust.

2 interesting articles

I’ve recently read 2 interesting articles on the use of colour online:

blog.eyequant.com/2013/06/27/capturing-user-attention-with-color/

http://conversionxl.com/which-color-converts-the-best/

The second of these attempts to answer the question, “Do green buttons out-convert red buttons”. It shares a number of test results and the answer is… no.

The button that won was usually the button that stood out the most. (My point #1 above.)

Summary

Summary, I’m still sceptical about the “colour x means y” school of web design. But I believe there’s compelling evidence for using contrasting colours to lead visitors towards conversions.

Steve

Categories: Conversion