The way you present your brand extends beyond the words you use to describe it. Your visual identity and the way you interact with your audience all play a role in how people interpret your message. The way you present your message is just as important as the message itself if not more so. Particularly in encouraging user interaction and media engagement.
Subtle aspects, such as color, line, shape, and font, are important. Most people believe that design is a creative talent. Many people believe that you either have a natural talent for creativity or you cannot develop one.
That’s not always the case, though.
People respond to visual stimuli subconsciously. To start, you need to get rid of the idea that your website has to be sophisticated. Websites that have high bounce rates are not beautiful. And, they don’t convert well.
The most important thing for your website is that it is functional and easy to use. It is also important that your website loads quickly. By learning a few psychology principles, you can improve the usability of your website and increase user engagement, including social media engagement.
Here are five psychology-based design tips for improving user engagement.
Let’s get started with the first tip.
Evoke a visceral reaction
Beautiful websites don’t get good conversions.
You can sometimes make people love you by doing things that stimulate their nervous system. People are really enjoying your website and can’t get enough of it.
Visceral reaction.
We all react, subconsciously, to certain things.
How we are subconsciously affected is relatively consistent because these reactions are rooted in our old brain, regardless of gender or demographic.
So, how can you make people want to experience your website again by evoking a visceral reaction?
You can make your content more engaging by using colorful pictures.
If you want people to trust you and engage with you on social media, it’s important to choose your words carefully.
You can also create memorable and fun experiences by using the elements on your website.
This text discusses the benefits of reading product descriptions. It claims that doing so is not only a great way to learn about a product, but also results in successful social media engagement. The experience has been widely shared on social media and has been written about extensively by bloggers because it provides users with an engaging experience.
Apply Hick’s Law to your design
The cognitive information capacity was assessed by psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman through choice reaction experiments. The number of choices available has a direct impact on the amount of time it takes to make a decision; the more choices available, the longer it will take to make a decision logarithmically.
A study that you might have read applied this law to a jam situation. The sales shot up from 3% to 30% when the number of choices at a grocery store was decreased by 18.
How does this law apply to your website design?
Choose a smaller number of options to give your visitors. Overwhelming them with too many choices can be a turn-off.
To create a more efficient system, you need to limit the options that you make available.
As a consumer, you are bombarded with a lot of information every day. Make sure your website offers visitors something of value and is relevant to them.
Here are the specific elements that you need to focus on:
- Keep the number of form fields to a minimum. Here’s an estimate of the conversions that you might lose, upon increasing the number of form fields.
- Every additional social network share button on your website contributes to increasing the loading time. So, find the social networks where your audience hangs out. Only show those sharing buttons on your blog, not 10 other options.
You can also use scroll maps to find the buttons that people are clicking on.
- Remember the landing page principle of, “One Page. One Goal,” wherever CTA buttons are involved.
The company saw a 42% increase in their click-through rate after simplifying their email campaign by removing three secondary call-to-action buttons and focusing on a single primary button.
- The number of elements on the navigational bar of your website must only serve the most relevant items.
Your homepage should not contain a lot of clickable items.
A tip for improving your website is to try removing the navigational menu from the top of the homepage. This could help simplify the page and make it easier for visitors to use. You can make your primary CTA more noticeable by directly focusing the user’s attention on it.
Put your users first and attempt to make a personal connection with them
Ultimately, it’s all about connecting with your audience emotionally. If you don’t deliver a relevant offer to the user when they visit your website, then you have failed.
Two ways to take care of user interaction are as follows:
Conduct interviews and user experience tests for qualitative insights
Data from analytics is a good way to make decisions, but it isn’t the best. Because it doesn’t tell you ‘the why.’
Yelp analyzed user behavior through five tests to see which elements of their website were most valuable to users.
The search bar was one of their major features and it was easy to use. Some elements, like the ‘Events’ tab, were not particularly noticeable.
Overall, Yelp found that although their site was usable, there was room for improvement in terms of effectiveness for the visitors.
The team at UXPin examined their usage data and created personas to gain a better understanding of their users. They segmented users, based on their behavior. Designers want people to feel like they are involved in the design process and that the finished product is easy to use.
Storytelling
Emotional user engagement can be achieved by telling stories. This is a classic and powerful technique. Your design should tell a story that is compelling and memorable.
Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling. Ecommerce brand Raven + Lily saw a 150% increase in sales after adding product storytelling and redesigning their website.
Principle of Least Effort: Make your users think less
This principle states that people will take the path or make an action requiring the least amount of mental and physical energy.
This means that your application should be designed in a way that requires minimal thought from the user in order to use it effectively. This principle can help UX designers understand why some design decisions were made. If there was no consideration for this principle, more work might be needed.
The design process is an ongoing one in which you will make changes and progress over time. This might not be a problem if your app was only meant to be used for a short period of time, but that’s not usually the case. It is important to keep in mind that users may become annoyed if too many changes are made without their knowledge. This is because they interact with the interface on many different platforms, so it is crucial to maintain a consistent user experience!
Designing an app can be never-ending, as even when everything looks perfect, there might still be some tiny detail left undone, which could cause problems down the line. By taking into account feedback from clients and testing various scenarios, one can easily avoid any potential problems by following some easy steps to ensure both clarity and design continuity.
People always want easy and fast solutions when it comes to digital content. This principle is what drives UX design, which is why society now expects a great user experience on both desktop and mobile devices. A large portion of content is consumed on these devices, so it’s important that they are easy and enjoyable to use.
Cognitive principles are the foundation for how humans interact with digital devices. Psychologist and cognitive scientist Susan Weinschenk has studied how psychology can be applied to UX design to work best for a human’s brain.
How to use this method in everyday social psychology
Designing websites and apps is a form of communication that involves creating a design that conveys a message or feelings. In order to design user experiences that are successful, it is necessary to understand how we think and how we see patterns forming. This is especially important for those in this generation who work as UX designers.
- Instead of informing your users about anything in the text, show them an example when you need to explain anything to them, such as when onboarding them. Grammarly’s onboarding process is the best illustration of web design psychology in action. Instead of reading interminable instructions on using Grammarly or figuring out how to navigate the system independently, the user opens a demo document and learns how to use it in a real-life example.
- Use grouping if there is a lot of comparable information. Use sorting and filtering if the groupings are enormous. Having a Search Bar is also a fantastic idea. For example, if you have many posts on your website’s Blog page, try categorizing them by subjects. Consider introducing date-based sorting or filtering. Furthermore, the Search Bar will allow your users to swiftly and simply locate what they are looking for.
- Also, keep in mind the text size, color, and contrast. It’s an issue if the text is too tiny to read without resizing the website. It’s also a reading issue if the text and background colors don’t contrast well enough or if they don’t interact effectively enough. Use tools like Usecontrast and Colorsafe to evaluate this factorial design psychology aspect.
- Understanding how humans perceive and react to designis crucial for any sound designer. When developing a site or app, qualitative analytics are vital in giving you insights into what users do when interacting with your product. By integrating these findings into how we create our designs, designers can build something that truly resonates with people’s needs.
Von Restorff Effect: The heart of UX Psychology
The principle was named after German psychologist and philosopher Hedwig von Restorff. According to Von Restorff’s Principle, also known as the Isolation Effect, objects that differ from their surroundings are more likely to be remembered than those that blend in. This is because standing out from the crowd makes an object more noticeable, and therefore more likely to be remembered.
This refers to a designer’s strategy of using a prominent call-to-action to improve the usability of their interface for users. The similarity between two objects is manipulated in order to study memory processes and how well observers can discriminate between them. The “Von Restoff effect” is a common principle in design that has been turned into a wordmark.
This theory states that designing interfaces in a certain way can make it easier for people who have difficulty distinguishing objects. A user with dyslexia might find it difficult to tell the difference between the text for “submit” and “cancel.” Designing these two buttons with some visual differences will make interfaces easier for users who need more time to process information.
Interface design is all about creating a positive experience for users by understanding what they want and need. This means that you sometimes have to be creative with fonts, colors, or shapes to complete specific actions. If you’re giving your users a long form to fill out, provide them with progress bullets so they know how much further there is left to completion! This will help keep them from feeling overwhelmed by the length of the form.
considering what our users will think about it?—?after all, we are designing something right in front of their eyes every day when we use technology at work and at home.
If you want to catch a user’s attention, make your plans different shapes, sizes, and colors. If you want to present offered plans in an unbiased way, make sure they are similar in size, shape, and color so that no plan is more favored than others.
We need to think about how our brains work when we design an interface so that it will be both useful and effective. This is a branch of psychology that studies the human mind and brain functions to make better interfaces for humans. The Von Restorff effect is when important information is highlighted on the screen using visual cues, making it more user-friendly.
Conclusion
Your website should be designed in a way that reflects your brand’s personality and the main message you want to communicate.
Here are 5 tips to help you create an effective website design: Each of these ideas are based off of proven psychological methods and will help keep people coming back to your website.
