Design-Ability: The Psychology of Web Design

Your website is, perhaps, the most important piece of marketing literature that will ever reach your target audience. It is often the first place prospects will go to learn more about your company, and it can and should serve as a hub to all your other marketing outlets. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that your website design reflects not only your company’s brand image, but also the expectations of your target audience’s demographic. In other words, it can’t just look pretty – it has to work.

Smashing Magazine, an industry magazine for website designers and online marketers, once suggested that quality website design can be understood best by breaking its components into tiers of needs, much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in psychology. You may find the first three tiers somewhat similar to the criteria we use when working on your site’s usability.

• Tier 1: It must be functional: your website design can’t just look pretty – it has to work, and it has to be competitive with the design features other businesses in your industry offer.  (ex: if all your competitors offer an internal search form, you need one too.)
• Tier 2: It must be reliable: Your site needs to work consistently every time.
• Tier 3: It must be usable: Is your site design easy to understand and use? How forgiving is it if a user makes a mistake? Does it redirect you to a page of helpful links when an error occurs, or does it give the user a nearly blank screen with an impersonal numerical error code?

Tiers 4 and 5 of the design hierarchy

Tier 4: It must be proficient: Does your website go beyond the basics and offer advanced features such as a live chat feature? A way to post reviews or testimonials? Social media integration? For e-Commerce sites, is your checkout process quick and easy, with very few steps involved? Can products be sorted by size, price, etc.?

Tier 5: It must be innovative: it’s not enough to simply have a site that’s easy to use, efficient, and on-par with your competition in today’s market. You need to be an innovator not only in the business world but in the design world too if you want to stand out in a crowd. Give your site a creative “think outside the box” look and feel that no one else would think to use. But keep in mind that a site can be too “outside the box” for its own good as well. Innovation is all about a perfect balance between adhering to what your customers expect to see and adding new design elements that will make them remember your site and brand.

At Niche Marketing PR we will redesign your site from the bottom up if necessary to make sure your website’s design is the best it can be at all tiers of the design hierarchy.

Additional design tips for improving customer conversions

• Choosing the most effective color scheme is more difficult than it appears. What looks pretty to you might not look pretty to your target audience. Depending on what your product is, you may also want to consider the psychology of color combinations.
• Is your company’s logo in the most ideal location for attracting sales? How large or small should it be? Is it too dominant or distracting? Learn about logo placement and its effect on your site’s visual hierarchy.
• Emotional appeal is a key element of persuasion, especially when you’re trying to get someone to buy a product or service. Learn how to incorporate emotional appeal into your site design.

Website design isn’t the only component of your online marketing efforts we can help you with; it’s just one component of what we like to call The Ability Factor™. The Ability Factor™ is our secret sauce for turning prospects into customers via online marketing using a combination of:

• Design considerations (design-ability) < back to top of page
• Relating your message to your customers’ needs (use-ability)
• Getting your message out via SEO, social media, and more (vis-ability)
• And gathering analytics data so you can see your return on investment (ROI) grow for yourself (profit-ability)