Psychology and Web Design
You decided to build a website with Kommand! Great decision!
Ever seen a menu or website that you felt was almost offensive? Whether it was too many flashing images, autoplay loud music or the use of Comic Sans?
Psychology can come in to play a lot more than you think when users are scrolling through your site. You can evoke feelings of excitement or relaxation depending on your demographic and industry you are marketing to. Using psychology is the easiest way to increase traffic on your site and get users to stay for longer to ultimately make a purchase.
Here we’re looking at the 3 main design strategies around colour, typeface and imagery.
Colour
Nothing new, but colour can have a huge effect on emotions. Green with envy? Red with anger? But too much of it and your customers will be confused. Remember to include whitespace to break it up your content, especially if you’re going for bold shades.
Here are some of the most common colours and how to use them to your advantage -
- Blue evokes a sense of trust, relaxed and professional. Used by social giant Facebook and Pay Pal, who we all give our bank details to willingly. All though this is quite a good place to start, studies have shown it’s not the best to advertise food. The colour has been associated with poison evolutionarily since there are so few blue foods.
- Red is indicative of vibrancy and energy. Popular with media outlets such as BBC, CNN and YouTube as it grabs attention and encourages actions. It is also the colour of love and romance so used by many dating websites (Tinder, anyone..?).
- Pink is associated with femininity and softness and unsurprisingly used by brands such as Agent Provocateur and Benefit Cosmetics.
- Green is often thought of as refreshing, being associated with the environment. Used heavily in the health and healing industry and also the charity sector used by Oxfam and MacMillan.
Typeface
Whilst the dreaded Comic Sans and even Times New Roman get a bad rep, the legibility of the font you use can have a huge effect on the user experience.
- Serif fonts such as Times, Georgia and Baskerville are associated with reliability and respect, perfect for corporate sites.
- Arial, Calibria and Century Gothic are Sans Serif fonts and are quite universal in use as clean, modern typefaces.
- If you’re going for a more bold and funky font, Slab Serifs are the way to go like Rockwell, Museo or Courier.
- Script styles evoke a feminine, creative or elegant tone to your site. Great examples are Pacifico or Lobster.
Pay close attention to size and spacing too. A huge font size can be too much to take in and may look like it’s masking the lack of content. Also, too small a font and it may not be easy to read. Keep paragraphs short and snappy in easy to digest chunks. If you don’t leave enough space, the elements of your page can look a bit cramped and people won’t stick around to read it.
Images
The visuals on your website are probably the most important thing. “They” say a picture is worth a 1000 words. Well a video is worth 1.8 million words!
Be careful of the images you choose. As we don’t all have access to a photographer for everything we’re trying to convey, there are great stock photography websites to use (some free). The days of stiff stock images are dead, sites plastered with people grinning and a thumbs up are the last places users will trust. Depending on the message you are going for filtered photos or even cartoon imagery can work best. But please, please avoid images like this...
Have a look at some competitor sites, what images are they using and what can you do to make your site better? For any advice on how to choose your design or for advice on what could work for your industry, just get in touch - support@kommand.me or hit us up on Facebook!
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