One of our favourite element of website design that really excites me, in fact, it was the reason I got into website design is the psychology of websites. This is all about applying what we know about our human habits and instincts to the online world to make the whole experience easier and help create websites that achieve the aim you have set for them and not just look pretty.
This is not about tricking people to purchase your product or marketing tricks but to make sure there are no barriers when people want or need your service or product.
So if you want to get your website to work for your business then you need to first think about our brains, instead of thinking of the brain as a whole we need to understand there are three aspects to our brains and they all work in different ways with different priorities, they are the primal, emotional and rational parts, and they all work together when making a decision.
For your website to talk to your audience easily we need to engage all areas of the brain.
The Primal
Which likes things easy, and not having to think too much.
To please the primal part of our brains make sure you use common layouts, but don’t worry, this does not mean you can not have a creative and unique website. But you should make sure your logo is at the top of your website either to the left or centred. And the website navigation (also known as the menu) is across the site near the logo or down the left-hand side.
The Emotional
Our emotional part of our brain controls our fear, trust, happiness, sadness and our risk and reward system. It also controls how we associate our surrounding with our needs.
A visual method such as a video or picture showing where your potential customer is now, versus where they can be with your help, can get your audience to empathies with a situation that your target audience would need your services in, helping them understand your service better.
Our brains have an amazing ability to react the same way whether we are experiencing something or watching someone else experience it, therefore by showing someone using your service and ending up in a better happier place, allows your user to experience these emotions too.
The Rational
This controls our ability for planning, organising, problem-solving, learning, coming up with ideas, and all of the higher brain power functions.
For example, if you are shopping online for cake tins, most of us here at graphic icing have more than enough cakes tins (because we love cake) but the primal part of our brain thinks… Cake and the emotional thinks baking cakes make me happy and it is only after these thoughts that the rational part kicks in and thinks well I don’t really need another cake tin but if the website had focused on the need for different sizes to make the perfect cake the rational might think I don’t have a 20cm square one.
The Rational brain just wants a clear and easy to see reason and some examples you can use are product demonstrations, a list of specs or benefits, and reviews or testimonials.
So to summaries to make your website easy to use, without your potential customer getting confused or uncomfortable you have to target the three parts of our brains, primal that need things easy, the emotional that needs to experience and the rational that needs to have a reason.