Analysis of experiments to determine individual colour preference

Finding an efficient way to understand individual colour preference is important to researchers and designers. This article compares three research strategies to test individual colour preference including two research experimental environments (online and laboratory) and two research methods (multiple choice for N-alternative-forced-choice and multiple choice for rank-order). Three psychophysical experiments have been carried out. Participants were presented with six colour patches (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple) arranged in a random order on a computer display. In the first two experiments (Online experiment and Laboratory experiment I), participants were asked to indicate which colour square they prefer most; in the third experiment (Laboratory experiment II), participants were asked to rank their colour preferences of the six colour patches. The similarity between the results obtained from two experimental environments provides some validation for the online protocol and suggests that online experiments could be used more often. Pairwise comparisons for individual colour preference between genders and nationalities were carried out, and it was found that male and female responses were significantly different; but there was no statistical significance between Chinese and UK participants. The results from Monte Carlo simulations suggested that the rank-order method should be preferred for individual colour preference studies involving small numbers of participants (especially less than 15 participants).