The power to evoke the right emotions in web design and to touch the right cord with your visitors will help making your website popular and improve conversion rates. Luckily, when you’re not running a massive website it’s much easier to make changes to your website design without worrying about any negative consequences.
The paradox of choices
In the year 2000, a couple of psychologists published a very fascinating study. They wanted to see how number of options affects the choices users make. The result of the study was that when there are too many choices, people hesitated from making any choice at all, resulting in lesser sales.
So, the lesson is that, instead of confusing your customers with too many choices, give only limited path. Make choices easy.
Making Choices Easy
Look at any regular sales page and you’ll see someone trying to sell their product for a particular price. If you’re lucky you might even see a higher-priced product, which is the same thing only it includes extra bonuses.
The scientific approach to increasing your profits would be to add a third pricing tier into your design. At the moment, the majority of your visitors will opt for the cheapest option, but if you include a version of your product at a very high price point they’ll assume the middle option is a bargain.
Now the majority of people will buy the higher-priced product you were originally selling instead of the cheapest one.
Incorporate Trust Into Your Design
You can do this in a few different ways, but there are little things you can incorporate into the design of your website to build trust with potential customers. The biggest one for people selling online is, security logos, because even though most people are now happy paying for something online they won’t give their credit card details to anyone.
Having a phone number displayed on your website will make people more emotionally relaxed even though they won’t call you.
Showing off testimonials on your website works too, just make sure they are real from real people, along with the identity of the person who gave the testimonial.
Your About Page Needs To Tell Your Story
A few years ago, a company found it strange that a large percentage of people abandoning their shopping cart would visit the ‘about’ page before leaving the site. After carefully analyzing the data they realized those lost customers would visit the page after abandoning their cart because they wanted to find proof the company was reputable in order to alleviate their nerves. They lost anxious potential customers, but after working on the design of the ‘about’ page which included adding a video, they found when people left the cart a greater percentage of them would return to complete their purchase.
About page is an excellent place to market your idea. Tell your story, what you do and why yo do. A carefully crafted About page will help in earning trust.
Use Professional Product Images
Research carried out on the importance of visual factors when buying products produced startling results. A massive 92.6% of people said they put the most important on visual factors. They cared about it even more than picking the product up and holding it in their hands. This is great news for businesses selling products online, but only if they take advantage of the findings. At the very least, you should be using professional images of your products, and if you want to please your customers even more you can use extra images and videos. When you add videos to product pages you’ll be surprised by the increase in sales, but extra product images from different angles will work if it’s your only option.
Choose The Right Color To Touch The Right Emotions
Before we get started, I’d just like to say a brand is a million times more than a color scheme or fancy logo. That doesn’t mean you won’t need to choose a certain color scheme everyone will associate with your brand. They might think of Coca Cola when they see a red car driving by, which you won’t be able to replicate, but when they land on your site they’ll feel comfortable knowing they’re in a safe environment.
Every color is known to touch on different emotions, and you can choose yours based on the industry you’re in and the specific audience you are targeting if you don’t want to mess it up.
Use the right color palette that fits your website niche. See this page. It shows the relation between color and the emotion that it evokes.
Use the right color palette consistently across the website and even in your other marketing material.
First Impressions Do Count
As much as we’d like to pretend first impressions aren’t everything, they are in most cases. This is true in web design and you don’t get any second chances, because if your website doesn’t hit people on an emotional level they won’t come back once they leave. It also goes much deeper than having a beautiful design with an interface people will understand. The design of your site needs to show them it’s worth sticking around, so the perceived value must be high. Using a completely crazy example, your wacky multicolored design could look fantastic, but if you’re a lawyer trying to attract clients it will be a disaster.
Navigating Your Website
Sadness, anger, and disgust are very negative emotions. They also happen to be the kind you might see when people can’t navigate their way around your website. Amazing navigation should be the cornerstone of your design, and it’s not only to help everyone find what they’re looking for quickly. You also get to push potential customers in the right direction if you set up your site’s navigation correctly, which means you’ll sell more products. Whether you care about making more money or not, if your navigation is bad enough to frustrate visitors they’ve been proven to leave in a hurry. You should learn to pretend you’re a first-time visitor so you can check your site’s navigation on a regular basis.
The Golden Ratio Of Typography
The typography of most websites is usually an afterthought, but what if I was to tell you it was a vital part of connecting with someone’s emotions? In fact, there is a Golden Ratio of typography based on mathematical principles guaranteed to garner optimum results. The line height, font size, and line length will all depend on the particular font you decide to use. Inside the article we’ve linked to you’ll be able to use the Golden Ratio calculator to find out the numbers or font you need. Don’t forget, simple and large fonts will also outperform anything else right now.
Emotional Web Design
Hopefully you can now see how important emotions in web design truly are. If you’ve spent time building a business you’ll know how much emotions come into the equation when you’re writing articles, but web design often gets left out as people don’t have the skills to do the work on their own. You should be able to implement everything we’ve discussed today even if you’re not a web designer. You don’t need the fanciest design in the world, because you can’t fail if you touch people on an emotional level. Test out each of these individually so you can see how big an impact they have on your business.