Design Psychology For Your Website

Design Psychology of An Effective Website

September 26, 2014

One of the ultimate goal for a business website is to convert an visitor into a customer. To achieve this, the business website have to be convincing enough for its visitors to buy (or become your customer).

The design of a website will affect presumption of people to your business/company image, like how serious you are into your business, how trustworthy your business are, the quality of your service/products.

Today, we will talk about the psychology of website design, which play a big role in the success of a business website but rarely brought up by most website designers.

responsive-web-megaprinting-view-on-every-devices — Company website design on every Devices

1 Know Your Target Audience, Understand Their Needs

1 What is the basis of design psychology? — What is the basis of design psychology?

Who are your target audiences? Why they come to your website? What information they want to see? Think in their shoes.

Organize the information based on the needs of your target audience.

The result is your target audience will have an happy browsing experience, they are satisfied because they found what they are looking for. Then, they will either contact you to buy your product, or sharing your web site to another friend.

2 Build a sense of trust

This mostly apply to website application, which the users will interact with the website to perform certain task (eg. E-commerce, portal, social network, etc).

Be it a vendor on street, money changer, salesman, fund raiser, we will have the wariness in the first encounter with them. Same thing happens when a user visit a website. He or she will judge the credibility of the website visually. In fact, this is the limitation of a website, the only way to engage with the users is though a digital screen.

Hence the visual design play a critical role here. The color scheme, layout, typography, shapes, images on a website, should be tinkered carefully for this essential goal, win credibility and convert.

Beside the design, the content is as important too. The choice of word, the ambiguity of information, deliberately making some information less obvious, brutally impact your credibility.

Therefore, we shall utilize the design psychology to make your business website trustworthy, which the users are willing to register, subscribe, buy, do business with you.

Logo Design with Blue

Blue represent “trust” in psychology, while shield is representatives of the security and safety. The text below logo clearly indicate that this company is providing systems related service.

3 Familiar with User’s Habits

When someone land on a web page, he or she looked forward to see a “thing” immediately.

If he did not see this “thing” they usually saw, they will feel like they go to the wrong place, indirectly concern about this page is not what he needs, not with a sense of (and therefore, also produced a distrust). They need to provide information at the top level of the entire site or a prominent position on the page. That this “thing” is the navigation bar, because everyone is accustomed to the site has a navigation bar.

Navigation Tab can help users identify web content, while they browsing the website information. For example, you have a website about environment friendly but there is no navigation bar on the top of the web page, only skyline graphics and beautiful sunshine. This will let the user feel lost and do not know how to continue and eventually, they leave your website.

Navigation bar is one thing, but the colour is another aspect of the application. The color scheme of your website should represent your business characteristic. The wrong color will drive users away, imagine a website of a security company, filled with pink and light purple, user do not sense the weight from the color, thus, no credibility.

The overall design is not only beneficial to end user, but also conducive to the user’s browser.

*Tips: users are accustomed to “About” and “Contact Us” link on every website.

4 Consistency Corporate Identity & it’s Branding

When users view a company website, they will presume the product will have the same visual style like the website.

To establish powerful branding identity, the website style should be consistent with the company product and company logo, in the sense of the color scheme, shape, and impression.

Always mainly red and white colour, and attractions constant product packaging, even the introduction of a new product, users can know that this is the Coca-Cola products.

5 Psychological touch

Touches on the emotional and psychological is very valuable tool that can affect users, enabling them to follow your engagement. Touches including “fear, guilt, a sense of belonging, as well as on the resonance values”.

The most common way to add a personal touch to your website visitor is using images. However, here are some examples of successful touch with interesting tagline:

6 Colour Psychology

Colour Psychology in the field of design psychology is a complex subject, but we have know well some basic guidelines and useful information to ensure that the colours match for a good design.

Here are the different meanings of different colours:

Red Intense, Passion, Love and Danger Synonymous

Orange a mixture of red and yellow, symbolising the Energetic and Enthusiastic, more calm than red

Yellow Warm, Happy. Symbolises Entertainment

Green Nature, Growth, New life, and sometimes also on behalf of the rookie, and occasionally Jealous linked.

Blue Calm, Cooperation, Trust

Purple Loyal, Rich, Noble

Black Conservative, Traditional, Mystical, Routine

White Purity, Innocence, Wild Colours

Gray Neutrality, Balance, Fined.

7 Reading Habits

As the “Z”, as people’s reading habits are: from left to right, top to bottom. This is why many pages are in the upper left corner of the reasons Logo.

If we arrange 3 articles horizontally, users will automatically know the most left is the latest article, while the most right is the oldest article. Thus we will take this advantage by place the featured content on the top / or on the left, as these are the positions where users almost always start their reading.

Besides, images in between content are used to comfort the eyes, allow the brain and the eyes to take a short break before continue reading.

8 Each page should have a Point

Just as people can only focus on one thing, like, every level of your interface is best to have a single focus point. Design elements to emphasize the focus on each page. So the user will be able to know what the function of each page is.

One of the characteristic of amateur design is, having all the contents crowded together with no white space. Do not be afraid to have blank area in design. Whether it is between the overall layout, or text, it is preferably to have some breathing space.