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I am currently updating the design of an existing app, which includes revisting the colour palette.
A key aspect of the app in question is a category range for a range of metrics (eg: Low, Normal, High, Very High) with some metrics having up to six.
Should the app's colour pallette be considered when defining the colours of these rating categories OR should they be completely seperate as they are functional colours?
Having the app's color palette will improve the user's sense of consistency. I don't find anything more significant than this.
If you have a separate color palette for the rating system, it will highlight the rating system and make it stand apart from the rest of the app. As humans don't read, they scan, it will catch their attention.
Use a separate color palette with increasing intensity as the weightage increases.
Avoid using a red-to-green or green-to-red kind of palette.
It would be visually strange to see colors of different saturation, at least. Having unmatched colors affect perception and readability.
I think it’s important to balance. Don't choose colors that are "far" from each other, and don't try to make them too similar in terms of their hue/saturation/...
Try to use some websites that allow to choose color for dataviz like: https://www.learnui.design/tools/data-color-picker.html
Also, I found articles like this one to be great (there are some great examples): https://blog.datawrapper.de/beautifulcolors/ “So if your color combination doesn’t look awesome yet, don’t immediately add another hue. Change the saturation and lightness first and see if that’s better.” So, just play around
Last but not least, someone probably would recommend to consider some accessibility guides/standards to improve readability. However, in my experience, they can be rather tricky to deal with in UI because such guides are more geared towards webpages with (long) articles, not for modern-day UI with a variety of different elements. My humble opinion. But it depends on the system
