In today’s world, human psychology plays a crucial role to attract a large number of audiences. Businesses use human psychology in various ways to advertise their product and compete in the market. Using Psychology for Better Website design is a no brainer. A website designer has to put his feet in customer’s shoes to get the idea about their requirements and expectations to form a good website. 

We can take the example of the retail businesses how they use human psychology to extend their business growth. Supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworth use big signs such as ‘I am Free’ or ‘I am on Discount’ around the stores to sell their product rapidly. These signs fascinate customers to buy those products and supermarkets get the perfect chance to sell their other product with that free one.

Content: 

• Know your audience
• Building users trust
• Appropriate use of visuals and colors
• Apply familiar patterns
• Human psychology behind font and typography
• Include isolation or the von restorff effect
• Efficient use of space
• Psychology of using various shapes
• Keep your content simple
• Highlights supreme services
• zeigarnik effect
• Organise navigation menu
• Make prominent CTA on the website
• Conduct UX research
• Conclusion

Here, the following 14 successful website tips in detail that you can use to build the website.

Know your Audience 

To use human Psychology for better website design the first and foremost step is to know your target your audience. Website design can differ as per the audience. All the images, colours you are going to put on your website simply depends on the audience you have. If your website for the elder people use soft colours and includes classical pictures.

On the other hand, if you aimed at the younger generations place some modern images, features and of course different colours. The below picture provides an example of competition between two brands on Mothers Day as both websites targeting the same audience.

Building users trust

It is not easy to establish the trust of users on your website. As users don’t like to provide their email address to any website that easily. Make sure your website provides enough information or solves some of their problems that can satisfy the users to some extent.

Therefore, they show interest to sign up or visit more frequently to your website. Don’t request for the email address initially.

Moreover, don’t include a lot of information on the web page as users don’t like to spend time by reading such explain information to get to the point as it is not a right approach to enhance user experience(UX). People like to see a white place on the website as it looks peaceful and more breathing instead of sticking in the middle of a lot of information.

Appropriate use of Visuals and Colors

The best way to go deep in a user’s subconscious mind and create good UX is to accurately use visuals and colours in your website design skills. Web technologies make it convenient to include different visual designs that can help users to build an interest in the website and make them spend more time. For example, include some relevant and high-quality pictures. Besides, the settlement and impressive use of colours can draw the attention of the customer to focus on the crucial aspects of your website. 

Whereas, the wrong use of colour and the addition of more visuals can ruin the website at the same time and slow down the loading speed of a website. For an instant, the use of a bright navy blue colour as a background and low quality of images can make the customer leave the website after one click as it is not very eye-appealing and lower the level of website design usability. 

The choice of right colours for background relies on what are the core colours of your company. If your organisation uses dark colours then it’s better to go with natural colours for the background.    

Apply Familiar Patterns 

The use of familiar patterns makes users feel comfortable and secure. Always ensure the purpose of your website is clear to the users and they can easily switch between the pages on the website. In this digital world, many websites on the internet are not secure and trustworthy and use different patterns to scam users. Always careful while being creative with your website. 

There are some basic patterns that users are familiar to see from a long time and an instant change in such patterns can make the users feel uncomfortable. For example, the logo of the functional websites most of the time is at the top left of the webpage and some people are familiar with this pattern.

You have to select appropriate typography as per your purpose or content. For example, Times New Roman is used to show professionalism and seriousness.

The scholarly article used this typography to convey their message. Whereas, Sans-serif fonts represent modernity, clean and exclusiveness. Serif font is used by New Your Time to deliver importance.

Include Isolation or The Von Restorff Effect 

Psychology of using various Shapes 

Not only the colours but also the use of different shapes are associated with different emotions of the human brain. Shapes can have a big difference in designing a website as they refer to a certain meaning for people. Therefore, all the big brands design their brand name with a certain shape. 

For example, the round shape represents friendship, unity, love and relationship and you can see many of the big brands using round shape in their brand names to promote their products and services with distinct colours as well. For example Pepsi and BMW. Look at the below picture to know how different brands are using specific  shapes to convey their psychological message.

Keep your Content simple 

The simpler it is the better it is. It doesn’t mean to design your website very simple and don’t be creative. The idea behind keeping it simple is to don’t add the big lines of unnecessary information and avoid using complex words because simplicity is always preferred over complexity and helps your website to be in users research as people use easy words to search anything on the internet and search engines appear on your website in most of the searches. 

Although your website has everything perfect including design, shapes, images and content. But if you have used complex and tough words that people can’t understand easily then you can’t deliver your message to everyone in the audience or can’t be in the long term users experience.

Highlights supreme services 

Another way to promote your services and products is the use of the primacy effect to announce it loud to your customer. Whether it is something new, free delivery with the purchase of a product or free trial of any product or on the sale product list. This will remain mostly in the people mind than as it is shown as a first item in the list. The human tendency is to memorise things more that are presented first this is what primacy effects do make your website design better.

Add Zeigarnik Effect 

This effect is used to indicate to people the progress of a task and if it is incomplete and human psychology displays that people tend to think more about the incomplete task and want to complete that. Therefore this will encourage them to finish their task. For example, if users are signing up or filling their profile details this effect will manifest the progress of tasks by dividing into different steps.

Organise Navigation Menu 

The most significant menu of any website is the navigation menu. This should be organised accordingly at the beginning and at the end of a website. This could be Home, About us, Products and Services, Portfolio, Contact Us or Help. 

Organising your navigation menu will help your website to be more productive and get many clicks to form the customers to gain more information. You should make this menu more visible to the users so they click that easily to further proceed the task.

Conduct UX Research 

You are designing the website for users. It is not that easy to just select a template that looks great and put the information in it. Designing a high-performance website requires you to be a UX professional to know the needs of the audience. Furthermore, there are numerous ways to conduct UX research that assist you to build advance users experience design like as given below:

Online Surveys: You can ask questions to your website users about the productivity of the website and can learn more about your users. The feedback will help to improve your website design as per mobile device and computer.

Interviews: Personal interviews with your users and discussion about the usability of the product can provide you with a lot of useful information about their interests and experience with your website. Your website can grow more by knowing and solving the user’s problems. 

First Click Testing: Another way of UX research is first to click testing as it tells you how much time users spend to complete their task and on the navigation menu which option is used most and also reveals where users take a long time to first click. Therefore, with usability testing, you can improve the website design and make it more worthy. 

Conclusion 

The use of human psychology while designing a website, web applications or a mobile app can bring great rewards to your business. If you are considering to build interactive designs then implement human psychology effects to make it even better. All the important factors related to human psychology are mentioned above and now it’s in your hands how to use it well to emphasise your product and servers on your website and get most of its advantages.

References

1 The psychology of Web design: How colors, typefaces and spacing affect your mood

2 Web Design Psychology: 5 Things your site must make your visitors feel – Virtual Window

3.How to Use Psychology in Your Web Design

4. Use Psychology of Web Design to Boost your Website Conversion
5. Retail and Consumer Psychology 101: 8 Ways to Increase Sales & Influence Customers – Vend Retail Blog
6. Psychology In Web Design: How To Influence Consumer Choice

7. The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods