Why do successful web designers choose to use the design principles and elements that they do? The answer is simple — they know what works. Great web designers understand what their audience pays attention to and what they should emphasize to get the desired reaction.
The best web design companies know how to make a website work as efficiently as possible and produce excellent conversion rates simply by choosing the right color and shape combinations, graphics, lines, and fonts. The tool that helps them in this quest is web design psychology.
Do you want to know more about the ancient art of web design psychology? If so, you’re in luck, as we’ve enlisted the help of our friends from a top New York web design company and got them to share their secrets.
Table of Contents
Table of contents
Below, you’ll learn how to build your website into a friendly place and evoke just the right emotions from your users. Without further ado, let’s get started!
Web Design Psychology 101 — Uses and Principles
Although we humans like to think of ourselves as highly cognitive beings, in truth, we’re still animals, and many of our first impressions and initial decisions are based on instinct and the subconscious mind. With websites, things aren’t much different.
The truth is that we make up our minds about whether we trust a website long before we’ve even read a single sentence of its content.
As a web designer, if you want to get a positive response from your users, you must remember that it only takes a few seconds to form a first impression. In fact, with websites, it may take a lot less than that. This is why you need to impress your visitors from the very start.
Let’s look at exactly how web design psychology can influence the success of your business and what you should do to get the most out of your website.
1. Building Trust
You could be a bona fide industry expert, and produce highly informative, high-value content, but if your site looks amateurish, you’ll struggle to reach an audience. Web designers know this, so instead of screaming about their professionalism at the top of their lungs, they use visual patterns that do the work for them.
The bottom line is that your field of expertise doesn’t matter as long as you can make your visitors feel at ease through good website design. If you can make the purpose of your website clear, you’re on the right track. This is the first step to establishing a trusting relationship with your audience.
2. Utilizing Psychological Triggers
Certain design elements will trigger your visitors to perform specific actions. Even things you may not notice at first glance matter, such as font size and background color selection.
Needless to say, things like relevant, high-quality images contribute a lot towards your overall professional image, while cleverly designing the outline and background of well-worded headlines and taglines makes your intent more apparent.
You can affect the way your visitors think, whether your brand is entirely new or a recognizable force in your industry. You only need to remember the basic principles of human psychology and behavior.
3. Working With Emotions
By understanding how the human mind works, great web designers can make choices that will affect their visitors in a compelling and meaningful way.
It is obviously vital to reach your audience’s conscious minds, but affecting their emotions can lead to much more significant impacts. Web design psychology can be a powerful asset in this regard.
4. Consistency in Patterns
Lots of things can make your website more recognizable and easier to remember. The way you choose to style your text, the types of images you use, or the colors that dominate your page can all become synonymous with your brand.
If you can stick to repeated patterns over an extended period, people will begin to associate these patterns with your website and your company by extension. This means they will subconsciously develop more trust in your brand as they will see it as familiar.
5. Leveraging the Visual Impact
When it comes to web design, few things are more important than visual impact. Some designs are simply more attractive than others, and people’s perceptions of what a trustworthy website looks like constantly change.
Of course, the easy thing to do is to take a few of the highest-performing designs on the market and adapt them to create something that works for you. However, if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper, you can achieve much more.
Original design elements, along with thought-provoking content, can have a massive impact on your audience’s experience, pushing your website and brand into the “trend-setter” category.
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6. Employing Negative Space
Negative space (also known as white space) is just what it sounds like — the empty area around an object on a page. In web design, it helps to make the elements included on a page stand out and makes it easier to navigate through them.
Without these spaces, the text is more difficult to read and understand, and the entire composition can become overwhelming to the reader. Thus, it is always good to utilize negative space to emphasize the things you find most important.
Integrating Web Design Psychology in Your Website
Now that you know which aspects of web design psychology you can explore and why they are so essential to improving the user experience, we can briefly talk about how to implement this knowledge into your site.
Focus on Your Customers
If you want your website and your business to be successful, you need to know your audience. Learn about their values, desires, and needs, and give them what they want. If you’re not sure about their opinion on something, don’t be afraid to ask.
It is much better to be moving slowly in the right direction than speeding off in the wrong one, so make sure to do as much research as necessary.
Prove Your Reliability
Once you have all the information about what your audience wants to see, make sure they know you made your website specifically for them. Everything from the fonts and images to the color tones should resonate with your customers.
Keep It Simple
Nobody likes to be confused. An overloaded page with massive amounts of text and dozens of images will likely overwhelm your readers, and if you want them to stick around, you should avoid that.
People are looking for quick solutions and answers, and if you can help them find those, they’ll keep coming back to your website.
Make Your Site Memorable
Any hard-working professional will know the importance of consistency. As we explained before, you need to let people become familiar with your website’s style, and the best way to do that is to keep the elements on the site looking consistent.
Final Thoughts
The web design process is not simple, and you can run into many pitfalls. That said, knowing the psychology behind web design can be immensely valuable and help you achieve the results you’re looking for.
In this post, we tried to explain the most notable principles of web design psychology in a concise and straightforward way. We hope you enjoyed it!
