The Psychology of Web Design: How to Use it to Your Advantage

Smart web design is more than just pretty colours and photos with relevant images. The psychology of web design affects how your site’s guests feel when exploring your site, how they make their decisions and how they view your business as a whole. Yes, it may seem wild that how a site looks can influence someone’s reaction to a brand as a whole, but seemingly subtle choices can have a huge impact on your audience.

This is why smart web design is so important. The wrong choices can leave a bad impression on your guests, and as we all know, first impressions are crucial.

You want your guests to know your business’s vibe right from the start. Web design experts can use a plethora of amazing tactics to influence how people feel. Read on to learn more about:

• The Intricacies Of Web Design Psychology.
• Important Factors Of Web Design That You Might Not Think About.
• How These Factors Are Used To Make User Experience Better.
• How You Can Make Sure Your Website’s Design Is Amazing.

The Psychology Of Web Design And How You Can Implement It Into Your Website

Once you learn about the psychology of choosing every aspect of a website’s design, you’ll realise its importance.

Here, we will focus on the following:

Colours That Encourage Feelings. It’s a well-known thing in graphic design that certain colours are associated with certain feelings. Colour theory is used to select the right colours for the right purposes and is very often used by smart web designers.

There’s a reason why so many social media sites use the colour blue and why so many fast food chains have red, orange and yellow in their logos. These colours can invoke certain feelings and encourage people to buy from or trust that brand.

It’s also very important to note that, like many other aspects of the psychology of web design, colour theory is not an exact science. Everyone has different associations with different colours and shapes due to their past, and not everyone will relate green to nature or red to anger. However, colour theory is still a very good thing to base your site’s colours on due to the fact that many colours are associated with specific feelings in our society.

A few common colours and their related emotions are:

• Red – Energy, Excitement, Boldness.
• Yellow – Warmth, Friendliness, Optimism.
• Green – Nature, Peacefulness, Growth.
• Blue – Trust, Dependable, Sincerity.
• Purple – Glamorous, Creativity, Wisdom.

Negative Space To Control Attention. Many people who are new to design think that if they have a canvas, they need to fill every single centimetre with as much good content as they can. Although good content is always great, too much of it can be overwhelming or even gaudy.

What would you focus on if you visited a site and there were fifty things to look at? Too much on one page makes a site confusing and frustrating.

Instead, smart web designers are using their knowledge of the psychology of web design to understand that minimalism and negative space can be used to their advantage. You can use cleverly-placed negative, or empty, space to direct your guest’s attention to important details.

For example, an important line of text surrounded by white space is a lot more focus-grabbing than that same line of text surrounded by images and other bits of the font.

Limited Options To Improve Decisiveness. We’ve all been there – you have a dozen things to choose from, and you just can’t decide what you want! Too many options can leave someone sitting and staring at their choices for far too long.

So, to help people out, try to limit your website’s navigation options to make things simpler and easier for your users. It’s a lot easier to choose between a handful of choices than it is to choose between two dozen.

Limited choices encourage your users to explore and enjoy your site without bombarding them with options.

Happy Faces For Happy Customers. Whenever you step into any retail establishment, you’re almost always greeted by smiling employees who welcome you and ask if you need assistance. This is, of course, all on purpose – being greeted by happy faces makes you happy, and it gives off the vibe that the brand you’re buying from is optimistic and positive. It motivates you to spend more and be more positive about your experience with the company.

This isn’t just limited to brick-and-mortar establishments, either; it can also be used in tandem with other aspects of the psychology of web design to improve your site.

Consider using photos of happy, smiling faces when appropriate. You can use photos of smiling people using your products or enjoying what you do. Many of us get happy when we see other people happy, so showing visible enjoyment can help your company.

Fonts That Convey Tone. There are so many fonts to choose for your site, and you need to find the one that fits your business.

Like colour, the font you use can influence how a person views your brand. Fancy, frou-frou font can give your brand a feeling of elegance and contemporary wealth. Bold, minimalistic text has a very modern sense to it. Loopy, rounded text feels fun and comfortable.

Although, just like colour, our association with certain fonts is also not an exact science, so there is no one right answer to what font you are required to use for your site. 

What You Can Do To Make Your Website Appealing And Effective

Our team at Kiwi Web Design understands the little tips and tricks used to make your site feel a certain way, and we’d love to see how we can make your website perfectly fit your brand’s goals and vibes. We’re thrilled to offer you our web design services for your Auckland business.

Do you want your website to have a certain feel to it? If so, we’d love to have a chat with you! Call us at 0800 932 669 or visit our website to get in touch. We can discuss what you want from your site and come up with ideas for how we can achieve that.

Use the psychology of web design to your advantage by working with Kiwi Website Design.