Sequential Philly’s redesign is bopping along.
Instead of hemming and hawing over color theory, I sent out a request for people to complete a short study about it.
I created 20 color palettes on coolors.co and numbered them 1-20, made a list of attributes/descriptors, and asked people to match the attributes to the palettes. At the end, I asked participants for any other vocabulary that came up as they were looking at the colors, and listed them underneath the main responses. I still have a few more tests to go, but so far the results are fascinating.
In these two examples, you can see that for one participant, some words had no specific palette match. For other words, multiple palettes felt accurate. I included words with both positive and negative connotations. Some of the extra terms participants gave at the end were surprising: “corporate,” “space,” “youthful,” and “dated” were ascribed to certain color groups that I wouldn’t have picked - and that’s exactly what I was looking for. So far, so good.
While the colors are being narrowed down, I’m also asking randos at cafes to complete card sorts for the site sections.
I see some patterns already, but I’m holding my tongue until all the results are in. The cafe participants were much calmer and kinder than I anticipated; I expected more pushback from strangers, but they’ve been excited to join these tests. This redesign has been a lovely experience so far.