Design

In a fast-faced and technology dependent lifestyle that we live in today, everything that we need is available within a click away. As a businessman, you need to be seen instantly online so that 1) your customers know that you exist 2) you offer what they need 3) you can connect with them and lastly, 4) to create sales. However, as much as it is necessary that you need to have a website, have you also considered the psychology behind how to keep them glued to your site?

It is not only necessary that your company should have a website, but a good one should consider the elements and design to maintain engagement with the consumer. Our purchasing behaviour is just as important to a design as the required elements themselves. Knowing how the human brain works play an important role in designing a website to convey the message that you want to deliver.

In order to achieve this, a web designer and business owner must understand how different website elements affect the mood, attitude, and experience of the visitor so that at the end, the user will have a positive impression. Let us look at these elements and see how it plays a role in affecting the purchasing mood of the consumer.

Content

Users look at a website for different reasons and content will be a driving force in convincing them to stay and click the “Contact” button or the other way around. Formatting and typography, however, is just as important as the content.

Your content should be well-organized, edited, and comprehensive to create the proper balance between information seeking, ease of use and visuals. Your content should serve its purpose when a visitor types in your URL—they get the information that they need quickly and they at ease afterwards, not overwhelmed. Otherwise, users will be irritable therefore losing interest in your site.

Tone is another detail that you should think about. If your organization or a brand doesn’t present itself appropriately to the users, they might have mixed feelings towards you. Stop beating around the bush; instead, make it easy to read and at the same time, attuned to the tone that you want to convey.

Space and Format

Organization (typography, content, etc.) affects the behavior and mood of your customer. From the beginning, organize your content so that it will be spread out evenly all throughout. “White space” or the area without any design is the viewer’s resting place. Depending on the concept of your site—do you want it to be minimalist or bombarded with pop-ups—white space is important so that the viewer can breathe. Otherwise, the user will become irritable and overwhelmed; driving them away.

In web design, you need to respect space and utilize it properly. You have to keep it simple yet big in impact so that visitors can discern the important things in the site; as well as for easy navigation.

Typography

Typography influences how customers are made to feel about your product or service. The right typography can persuade the user to love, buy or hate an organization’s product or service based on the curves of the font and color. Humans instantly associate fonts with emotions and judgements.

It is important that in the design process, you should think about the typography because it directly influences the effectiveness of the site. There are thousands of typefaces available online and depending on your tone, you can choose from:

• Serif fonts (i.e. Times New Roman)—often associated with professionalism and seriousness
• Sans Serif (i.e. Helvetica)—modern, informal, clean, upscale
• Old Style (i.e. Garamond)—traditional, classic, readable
• Humanist Sans (i.e. Verdana) –modern yet human, clear yet empathetic
• Slab Serifs (i.e. Rockwell) – sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough guy

Additionally, you should also think about how to present the fonts. Spaces between the lines (leading) and letters (kerning) are also important elements. The space between paragraphs, margin, and font size are also factors to consider. Congested paragraphs are hard to read and texts that that are too tight are uninviting.

Color

This is the first thing that visitors will notice on your site and if you give off the wrong impression, say goodbye to possible engagement. Colors influence how visitors perceive your site so from the beginning; select the color scheme that will reinforce your statement or brand.

Your website is like a blank canvass—neutral—therefore, paint it with complementary color. Neutrality and your official brand color should be balance to make a visual impression to the user. Depending on the hue, shade, tint and how you blended the colors, your message will also reflected.

Every color has a meaning so depending on the tone of your brand, here’s a list that might help you:

• Red- fiery and passionate
• Orange- Energetic and warmth
• Yellow- warm, happy, joy or cowardice
• Green-growth, renewal, inexperience, jealousy and envy
• Blue- calm, cool, often associated with corporate images
• Violet- royal, opulence, creative
• Black- chameleon, mysterious, sexy, edgy, safe
• White- purity and innocence
• Gray-conservative, sophisticated, moody
• Brown- wholesome, approachable, reliable

For our blog, we used a combination of Red, Green, Orange, and Red in our logo. It means excitement, trust, friendly, and growth. The reason behind it is that, we want to be a good source of information but with a little jolly since we don’t want our readers to get bored when they landed on our website.

Photos/Images

Sometimes, users don’t read the content anymore and just look at the photos. With the advent of photosharing apps like Instagram, people tend to look at the photos first before reading anything. In general, photos will influence the users’ sentiments.

Composition and colors should complement the overall tone of the site because it affects the subconscious telling the user how they should react with your brand and what to do on your site. When a user sees happy elements on your site, they will associate it with positives and may probably share the experience to others.

Choose photos and images that your company want the user how to feel. Do not focus only on the eye-catching, but also the values. The text surrounding the image may also reinforce or highlight key points of your message. Putting call to action texts on the images may lead to increased clicks and higher retention rate.

Conclusion

The psychology of the target audience influences the effectiveness of the design of a website. It is the responsibility of the designer to consider the typography, color and images and how to use it altogether to produce a website that will create a positive and lasting impression and experience for the user.