How To Use Psychology In Web Design and Boost Conversion Rates

Whether you want to attract more clients or develop deeper relationships with the ones you already have, you need to maximize your efforts to ensure your hard work doesn’t go to waste.

That is why you need to know strategies and use design principles to help you achieve your goals. Everybody knows that using the right tools and having a system in place can greatly improve your chances of success. This also applies to your business website.

When it comes to your brand, it’s mandatory for you to have a website that showcases and promotes your business and your services. However, having a basic website is no longer enough. If you want to succeed you need to make sure your website brings in the traffic, converts the visitors and generates the leads. One of the ways to ensure it achieves these goals is to increase conversions using time tested principles of psychology.

By understanding how people think, interact and shop, you’ll be able to build an attention-grabbing website. Follow these time-tested psychology principles to help you improve conversion rates of your website.

Practice Minimalism

One helpful principle of psychology you can apply to your design is minimalism. Focus on a few important elements. Keep your design clean and clutter-free. Our minds can only handle so much information at once before we are overloaded. We evolved to handle only so much mental work.

By focusing only on essential elements you’ll be able to help visitors navigate your site and see the features you want them to see, rather than bury them inside non essential content.

The experts who specialize in web design including web design agency in Sydney will tell you that simplicity is key. So focus on building the basic elements first. Don’t clutter you pages and have plenty of white-space in your designs

People have short attention spans

This item is closely tied to the first principle we covered. Our attention spans are extremely short, especially when it comes to the web.

Our brains don’t like to be bombarded by constant stimulation. Humans also crave stimulation. You need to find the right balance between giving out enough information while at the same time, not overloading them.

A common beginner web design mistake that should be avoided is a failure to capture visitors and the inability to explain exactly what you do in only a few seconds. Your copy has to be precise and clear. If you can’t explain what you do in a few seconds, the users will quickly get frustrated and leave.

To use this principle in your design, you need to place clear Calls to Action above the fold and in the visible location throughout your site. You also need to ensure your content tells visitors exactly who you are and what you do. Not having this information will drive first-time visitors away because they will quickly grow impatient and move on.

Use of color psychology in web design

Colour theory is one of the more interesting and unique aspects of design. The colors influence our emotions and affect our behavior and our moods.

When it comes to color theory, there are a few principles you should keep in mind. Darker shades of color evoke stability, strength, but also boredom, and melancholy. Lighter shades are energetic, enthusiastic, but can be a strain on the eyes. As far as the actual colors are concerned, red is passion, anger, it evokes fire. On the other hand, blue will soothe you, sedate you even. Yellow is happy and joyful, while white is clinical, but also pure. Know how colors affect people and use proper colors in your designs to ensure it’s consistent with the message you want your website to convert.

Use F and Z pattern layouts

Creating good content is important, but the manner in which you arrange it is just as crucial. A key element here is the F and Z layout patterns.

Our eyes move and gather information in either an F or a Z pattern. We read the first line, and then either skim down to the bottom line, or at best read the first word of every line, reading another at the middle, and then continuing with the first word of every line till the end. Only if it seems interesting we will continue reading the article more thoroughly.

So why is this important? Because you can use it to your advantage. When setting up your content, you can put the most important information and keywords to follow this pattern making sure your visitors notice elements you want them to see results in better conversion rates.

Apply Gestalt principles

The use of Gestalt psychology which explores how elements are perceived in relation to each other visually is also commonly used to improve web designs and conversion rates.
Some of these Gestalt principles include the concepts of proximity, similarity, closure, and continuity.

One of these psychology principles that you should be familiar is the idea of similarity. Similarity means that similar objects should be grouped together. The human eye searches and craves patterns, and it’s up to you so supply this and help organize your website visually. By grouping elements that you want to be found next to each other, you can increase the chances of users finding what you want them to find and taking the action. This means putting large images next to forms you want them to fill out. Or organizing your services close together to provide visual cues.

Conclusion

As you can see psychology can play a significant role in improving your website and increasing its conversion rates. By learning and applying basic principles and theories used in the field of psychology you can greatly increase the chances of users engaging with your content.