Designing eLearning courses can be a challenging task. These courses are essentially a classroom, and as such, they need to be welcoming, yet authoritative; clean, yet fun and engaging. Color is one of the crucial elements that instructional designers need to understand when creating eLearning content.
Color psychology and the abundance of research on the topic should be taken into consideration when making design choices. According to DesignAdvisor, smart color choices can make a brand’s message more effective, increase user engagement, and even increase revenue and conversions. In this blog post, we’ll highlight two of the most critical factors related to color choice when it comes to developing eLearning courses.
Choosing the right color
It’s hard to deny that colors convey a particular message: red means danger, green means go; yellow is bright and happy, grey is toned down and discreet. Color psychology focuses on understanding the most common human responses to colors and explores which colors are associated with specific messages and evoke certain emotions. All this comes with a significant caveat – these associations are not entirely universal and strongly depend on cultural background, mood, and many other factors.
Thinking about what message you want to transmit with your site before choosing your color scheme is vital, as it can help you establish your message through visuals. For example, research shows that blue is the best color to use in most eLearning courses as it creates a sense of tranquility, trust, and authority. This is why trust-demanding industries like finance and health-care use it abundantly. You may also want to consider your particular eLearning niche. If, for example, your course is dedicated to natural beauty, health, or wildlife, you may want to consider green for your color scheme, as it is typically associated with nature and ecology.
Use color to drive conversions
Just like any other website, eLearning platforms/courses need to drive user attention to the right parts of the content, and highlight important information in the course. It’s critical to remember that color can be a useful tool to improve user experience by making it intuitive for the learner to direct their attention to certain elements in your course.
Testing has shown that some of the best colors for Call to Action (CTA) buttons are red, green and orange. This is mainly due to their high contrasting nature. Essentially, if you want your learners to pay attention to the entire course, you should utilize highly contrasting colors.
Many online courses have observed significant improvements in conversion rates by implementing changes to CTA buttons’ color choices. For instance, one online gambling site managed to increase their sign-up rate by 175% after changing their button from green to yellow.
Final thoughts
Disregarding color as a valuable design tool is a mistake. As we’ve seen, effective use of color can reinforce your instructional message, help you properly direct user attention, and even increase revenue by making CTA buttons more attractive.
This infographic will give you additional information about using color psychology in your course design.
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