The test was carried out over a few days of traffic and the pages received around 2000 visits, with button clicks being measured by Performable. They found that, interestingly, in this case the green had a much bigger impact than red and drove conversions 21% higher. In this test, two pages were used - the original page used a green button color and a duplicate page used a red button.

This is more than likely due to what’s being tested for what platform, rather than being as straightforward as ‘ Red Beats Green‘, as put forward by HubSpot concerning the Performable A/B testing. There are plenty of case studies to be found online, but many of them are conflicting. The great ‘red vs green’ war has been a long-running battle on the web, with no definitive winner. This could be a duller green or even more effectively as a neutral gray color. This can be done most effectively by simply muting the color that you don’t expect the user to take. The confirmation of that action shouldn’t need to be a 50/50 yes/no question. This means the user can spend less time processing what should be a simple choice.įor you consider, that they initiated the action. In order to overcome associations, the commenter points out that it’s more effective to simply de-emphasize the button that you prefer the user not to take. This can be simpler and not have to force the user to spend time making sense of the color-to-label association.

However, as one discussion participant pointed out, it also raises questions surrounding ‘false positives’.īoth ways seem to pose a false-positive paradigm. Green also means ‘go’ in many countries, as well as a sense of nature, and gives us a sense of ‘going forward’ and growth. There’s little getting away from what red means in Western societies. This is true when it comes to your phone too: the red button warns us that we’re going to cut off a call, whilst green gives us the message that we’re going ahead with than call. This is an ideal tool if you’re thinking of retargeting your site design for particular geographic regions. Today most parents would get strange looks if they dressed their baby boy in pink, yet this was the norm a hundred years ago.Ĭheck out this great color wheel for a quick reference guide to what colors mean in various cultures.

Like spoken language, we learn it from childhood, and, like language, it varies from region to region, and even era to era.

Of course, color psychology isn’t hard-wired into our brains. This is likely to be the reason for using red for delete buttons - it naturally gives us pause due to its connotations. It also typically denotes danger in Western civilisations - think of stop signs, fire engines and tail lights. As far as standard online usage goes, red has been commonly associated with the delete button.

The red button quiz