Rocket Color
Color is important because it unifies the customer experience, strengthens accessibility, shapes user behavior, influences emotion, and elevates a brand’s identity. A consistent and well‑defined color system ensures a cohesive visual language across all touchpoints, helping users instantly recognize and trust a brand. By improving contrast and clarity, color also supports accessibility, making products easier to navigate for all users.
Client
Rocket Mortgage
Role
User Research Usability Testing Design System Guidelines
Industries
Mortgage
Date
August 2021
THE PROBLEM The current color palette within the design system is underperforming in both accessibility and brand expression. Our primary teal fails to meet WCAG AA 2.0 contrast standards, limiting readability and inclusivity. The palette itself is poorly defined and lacks sufficient documentation, leading to inconsistent application across products and touchpoints. This limits visual coherence, hinders scalability, and reduces the overall impact of the brand experience. CHALLENGES ✔ Make all of our digital products WCAG 2.0 AA accessible allowing more clients to use our products ✔ Broaden toolkit, improve hierarchy and usability through color for increased conversion ✔ Achieve competitive advantage and tie threads with brand positioning and design philosophy ✔ Create experiences that will increase conversion and boost long-term brand recognition and preference THE VISION Based on the brand sentiment testing, we found Orbit’s color system creates a modern and approachable visual identity that sets our brand apart in the market. It grounds designs in both distinctive character and color psychology. By thoughtfully combining inviting hues that soften red’s traditional associations with error and urgency, the palette encourages engagement and empathy while leveraging red’s strength for highlighting important actions. The harmonious blend of colors makes our brand relatable and purple enhances feelings of trust. These choices empower designers’ at Rocket Mortgage to build deeper connections with users through memorable, differentiated design.
THE IMPACT The research showed that while color isn’t the main factor in how users judge usability, it meaningfully enhances their sense of reassurance and ease when navigating Orbit. Most users felt the system’s color choices helped them feel confident taking action, though a small minority found red to be distracting or stressful. Overall, Orbit’s palette strengthens RM’s brand attributes of simplicity, trustworthiness, and relatability, contributing to a more positive user experience. Importantly, aligning color usage with clear, documented principles ensures these benefits translate consistently across Rocket Mortgage’s expanding design organization, enabling teams to maintain usability and brand impact as they scale.
See highlights of how the documentation formalized the direction and made applying the new color direction straight forward.