Just as the world is driven by emotions, so is your website design. Unfortunately not many understand this.
The best logos, brands and websites have been designed with emotions in mind. While banking websites explore approachability and friendliness, sports websites exude excitement. In the process of promoting the brand or selling the products and services, many businesses try to create connections with the emotions of their customers.
It is the emotions of these customers that make them respond to the design, visual aesthetics and the experience that a website creates. A design that ignores the emotions of people can only result in being ignored by the people.
So then how do you connect with these emotions?
- Through your company: By expressing the emotional qualities of your business
- Through the market: By connecting with the emotions that are associated with their needs and purchases.
- Through yourself: Almost all customers would love to work with you if you personalize your services. This also includes website personalization too.
You need to work through all these channels in order to make your customers respond to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Onqmg2StqM
Assume you are constructing a house. First thing you would need to do is build a solid foundation. Then you start dividing the space and building the walls. It is the same concept in web design too. You need to determine your internal design goals, find out who your users are and discover the way in which they will use your website. Once this is done, you can move on to the design of your website. However, don’t be nervous if you are a novice at design and development because there are some cool website builders.
So, how exactly do you build emotions into your website design?
You might be aware that, when youmake a website, the various obvious aspects of design such as colors, images, shapes, fonts etc. should be taken into consideration. Let us now look at the not-so-obvious ones:
Humor: Humor is something that lets you connect with people easily. When you are meeting a complete stranger, a little bit of humor can help you in breaking the ice and making the person feel comfortable in your company. You have to apply this concept to your website design. Nevertheless, humor as such is a very delicate aspect. What might seem funny and hilarious for one may be embarrassing, ridiculous or sometimes even insulting to another person. Understanding your target audience can help you find out if what you are conveying actually seems funny to your users. Even if you cannot make everyone smile through your humor, try your best not to make any person feel uncomfortable or offended.
Recognition: When building relationships with people it is the emotional connectivity that all of seek. This is why users like to see faces on websites and recognize themselves in them. Apart from faces, content such as problems, habits or dilemmas also help users in feeling connected and also understood. It is important to use human presence on your website to make people connect and recognize themselves on your website.
Dissonance: Another thing that helps us fit into a world is patterns. They help us in understanding and learning how things work. They let us know what to expect and thus feel comfortable. There are certain guidelines of web designing that you need to follow. When you do this, the users will start recognizing patterns on your website and take the action that you want them to take on your website. Not following the standard patterns will lead to frustration in users that may make them abandon your website.
Tone of Voice: The way you communicate with your users determines the kind of relationship you are likely to develop with them. It all depends on what you are selling, who are your buyers and what is the context in which you are conveying your message.
Engagement: Even a perfectly designed website will sometimes have high bounce rates, not many sign-ups or characteristics that may not be worth remembering. This may be because they may not be so engaging enough for the users. You have to try achieving this engagement by personalizing your content and making your website interactive. Including a few entertaining videos may help too.
Understand what your users want and cater to it in the most creative way. This will help in coming up with a design that appeals positively to their emotions.
