How Color Coding Encourages Emotional Interactions While Using Smartphones

ISBN 978-3-030-20141-8

DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-20470-9_2

PUBLISHER. Springer

AUTHOR/S/. Young Ae Kim

CATEGORIES. Usability, Emotional Intelligence

KEYWORDS. Attention, Color, Emotional Intelligence, Mental Recall, Positive Emotion, Happiness, Zoom lens model of attention, Perceptual span

ABSTRACT.

Human cognition involves highly interrelated mental processes. The essential mental process is connected with the environmental influences that help to store and remember. Color is the essential optical experience to user experiences as an influential communication channel to human cognition, which is a meaningful position in improving memory performance. However, color coding can be detrimental under certain circumstances. Can color coding improve memory capacity? Can color coding influence emotional arousal? Can color coding help to create a mental map to navigate information in apps? This research discusses the relationship between colors, attention, memory, and emotional arousal. It addresses color coding in similar and different settings, an exploration on the human memory, and the role of emotional arousal and memory while using smartphones.

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”

- Wassily Kandinsky

Overview

For centuries artists and designers have manipulated color to evoke certain responses from their audience. Research on colors has been overflowing as a touchstone in one's memory and emotions in particular marketing, art, and design areas. Researchers have made observations about the psychology of color and how moods, feelings, and behaviors are affected by colors; however, it is a relatively new science and determining the effects of color has been difficult.

Color is an influential communication instrument, which is used to influence mood and physiological reactions [1]. However, it is often greatly personal experiences in terms of how one feels about the color. For instance, black is used in many Western countries as a symbol of death and mourning, while it represents life and rebirth in ancient Egypt. Color can be an extremely effective learning tool in educational settings, marketing, communications, sports, and more. Colors can increase brand identification by 80% according to a marking study. Color has been used as one of the influencing elements to get attention, shape attitudes towards products, and adds pressure to decision-making for consumers in advertisements [2]. This demonstrates the importance of color in marketing and how the information and message deliberations.

Color can encourage academic achievement and the cognitive abilities, including perception, attention, memory, and comprehension. For example, autistic patients reading without using a colored overlay improves reading speed up to 35% [3]. Farley and Grant’s 1976 research on the influence of color on attention has encouraged further experimental works on the influences of color on the human cognitive process were conducted [4].

It is vital to identify the emotional influences of color in this research, which focuses on how colors influence emotion. Emotion occurs instantly upon the perceiving of evocative colors. This research proposes a perspective of how colors influence emotion with or without functional feedbacks, encouraging either positive or negative interactions while using products or services. Daniel H. Pink suggested the emotionally intelligent signage on words only to encourage one’s respect towards others in need and understanding others’ circumstances [5]; however, this has efficiency issues and is not applicable in diverse platforms because it requires many words to explain this detail. This paper predicts that colors influence one’s desire to interact on initiative with low stress and frustration from the visuals of products and services we use.

This research delivers an enjoyable experience to an individual that is autotelic and necessary. It must be a combination of internal and external experiences to encourage an individual’s motivation. However, the perception changes can be exceedingly influenced by current state more than general traits [6]. In other words, it changes an individual’s perceptions and motivations by emotion that is influenced colors.

“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

- Paul Klee

Emotional Design & Effective Color Coding

 

EMOTION & PERCEPTION.

When an individual needs to express their reactions to a given situation or an object, emotions are the tool they use. Emotions help to make decisions in a variety of short-term and long-term situations. On the other hand, the perception study has been relatively different from the emotion study. Due to the isolation of perception and emotion study, researchers have experimented with processes in perceptions and emotions indirectly. The unique interaction between emotion and perception is discussed in this research. The research predicts that emotion influence perception and distinct levels of visual perception encourage emotion also. Thus, emotional stimulations give the value and importance to information about a given situation or an object. Moreover, the study that is reviewed proposes that information is formed with a collaboration between visual perception and environment, because people give higher level of attention to objects that have emotional and motivational relevance to an environment. Perception encourages immediate results without thinking about the costs of latent action and given emotional objects or situations.  It is very goal-oriented. In other words, the negative emotions, such as fear, support a change in order to see potential treats while the positive emotions support to keep the present way to see things.

COLOR CONTRAST.

Color contrast encourages attention to a particular color from another . It diminishes eye-strain and brings users ' attention to a screen. The impact on Color Contrast Color theory is vital to usability in order to create not only an aesthetically pleasing design but also provides / provided readability . When designing mobile screens , designers must take an account users possible situations and locations , because it influences colors due to brightness changes and screen to glare . Thus , it is important to check the contrast ratios , which demonstrate the difference in two colors . Table 2 shows the W3C suggestions in terms of the contrast ratios in terms of the relationship between body and image text , which helps users with color blindness , low vision , and legibility of text on the screen . The same contrast ratios are recommended for icons and important elements .

COLOR SCHEME.

Commonly, monochromatic colors (single color) have a comforting effect and work well with anything. It is comfortable to look and looks clean and classy. On the other hands, analogous color schemes use neighbor colors where one of colors becomes a focal point and the rest of the colors support the whole color scheme.

Color contrast with complementary relationships provide the high level of user’s attention while using a device; however, it works when the dominant colors with its opposite color were used. Creating a customized color scheme can accelerate attention at the most outstanding level. One bright accent color with monochromatic color can produce the most visually remarkable presentation.

It ain’t easy seeing green.

- Matt Roberts

Accessible Design for Color Blindness

 
 

Color blindness is one of the most common impairments (less than 10% of population ) and affects individuals using smart devices . Red and green are the most common challenging combination . Designers must apply several visual signals to give a visual attention due to diverse forms of colorblindness . In other words , there are several benefits of the important role of color , and it is critical to create a design system using strokes , patterns , action text , texture , etc . that is color independent . Designers must simulate color blindness in helpful instruments in order to test for the look of design output with different types of color blindness .

 
 

DEUTERANOMALY.

A reduced sensitivity to green light. This is the most common form of color blindness, and is thought to affect about 60 per cent of people who have color vision deficiency.

PROTANOMALY

A reduced sensitivity to red light. People with deuteranomaly and protanomaly generally have difficulty distinguishing between red, green, brown and orange hues

TRITANOMALY.

A reduced sensitivity to blue light, and much rarer than the other two types. This makes it difficult to tell the difference between blue and yellow, violet and red, and blue and green.

“Color is so much a matter of direct and immediate perception that any discussion of theory needs to be accompanied by experiments with the colors themselves.”

- Walter Sargent

Things to think about.

 

The current information reminder system in smart devices is one color-coded (red) with a number as well as notification boxes, which encourage attention due to the color contrast, but not intuitively to differentiate what is less or more important. It creates a negative perception of given information and discourages the desire for interaction with given contents. Information we are given through smart devices almost looks dangerous and scary due to the amount of information we receive every day, because information is treated the same whether it is urgent or not. Thus, we need to consider how to tell the information story to a user that it is safe and fun to explore, opening the full reflective force while the visceral level is operating at full force, because the appeals are apt when the reflective system collapses.

The research found that objectives with emotional and motivational relevance influence attention and the findings propose that emotional stimuli deliver the involuntary effects without providing the meaning of an individual’s emotional change [27]. Therefore, color coding can escalate attention to visual and content information in apps to be stored and strived positively. Color coding can influence an individual’s interaction to human memory performance in a given context; however, both short-term and long-term memory retention can be maximized by fewer color combination (i.e. monochromatic or Analogous colors) with the higher level of contrast with saturated hue and the luminance of the color (i.e. complimentary colors). In addition, color impairment and any implication related to colors must be considered and other visual elements must be explored to support this particular impairment.

 

There is a Logic of Colors.

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