Life is too short to calibrate
Color. The perception of light reflecting on items or emitted from them. It is not hard to understand that different people understand different colours while looking at the same one. So how do you design an experience perceived in the same way by all your users?
Color matters when designing an experience. The design must follow the branding guidelines and, if there is room left, the colour psychology guides. If you are not designing for a specific device or family of devices (hello Apple), where you know exactly how a colour will look like then chances are that across different devices the dark red you chose might come across as mid-orange, light red or dark yellow.
Don’t worry. Hold your UI designer from spending hours to choose the correct shade of green to look good on his Mac because his design will eventually find its way on the washed out screen of a Taiwanese Android phone with limited contrast and or saturation.
But make sure you
- get the visual queues you need in your design
- have enough contrast on popular devices
- choose the colour at least from the right pallet
- have enough devices to test for at least 60% of your users
When designing cross platform, life is too short for calibration…
