If you want to communicate with your potential customers on a deeper mental level, you should find and hire a web design agency that incorporates neuro design concepts in its work. This article includes 6 essential tips on incorporating neuroscience in web design and will provide you a better understanding of how and why neuro design works.
What Is Neuro Design?
The world of corporations and big budgets has finally embraced new design concepts and trends. Moreover, companies that make fortunes suddenly started trying to hire the finest web designers to create websites for them. The more projects these cutting-edge web design specialists accomplish, the happier the corporate world gets. And although they truly enjoy the results and fruits they get from their new websites, they don’t exactly understand how things work and what is making audiences flow to their websites.
We have now entered the age of neuro design – a one-of-a-kind combination of customer and user experience with neuroscience and cognitive science. This new design approach provides web designers with an incredibly effective way to communicate their creative vision through websites. It is, obviously, a new concept. And the approach has still to get to its own league of respect – primarily because it is still growing.
But at this point, neuro design focuses specifically on mental triggers intimately related to customer experience. Designers consider these triggers and incorporate them dutifully into their designs and consider the behavior, trends, and interactions of the future site’s target audience. Understanding what’s going on from a neuroscientific point of view allows web designing studios and web designers, in general, to build sites with outstanding user experiences that ultimately maintain client conversion rates.
How Is Neuroscience Used in Web Design?
In essence, neuro design is based on comprehending what lies in the heart and soul of every end-user. Web designers resorting to this approach have to conduct intense behavioral and contextual research before designing a site. Interviewing target audiences during the early design process stages help web design agencies get a clear view of customers’ needs and wants, and consider both positive and negative experiences. This way, they can create websites that are more appealing to customers than sites designed based on any random and baseless design trend.
Neuroscience states that most decision-making processes happen instinctively and automatically on an intuitive basis within which the brain’s fast-thinking area – System 1. Right after this automatic reaction, the brain activates its slower, reflective, and logical part – System 2. This notion is what lets reputable web design agencies get a new perspective on decision-making. So, if you want your site to be successful and converting, your web design agency must consider the work of both systems and find a way to connect them.
The thing is that System 1 mostly processes visual information – 90% of the given information is processed by it. So, forget about feeding your target audience with rational stuff – give them something intuitive, emotional, and perhaps brash that appeals to their emotions on the subconscious level.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #1: Providing a Choice
There was once an interesting experiment involving jars of jam. The lesson from the experiment is that when you have less choice, the conversion rate is higher. Let’s explain – say we compare option 1: a table with 24 jars of jam with option 2: a table with six jars of jam. Whenever there are 24 jars of jam, people stop more, but buy less; 60% stop, only 3% buy. As for the table with six jars of jam, 40% stop and 30% buy.
Even though people always say they prefer to have many options when you give them this number of options, they freeze, and in the end, they don’t know which one to choose. They always get annoyed and leave. Again, sometimes people don’t really know what they want, and sometimes they don’t know what is actually better for them. The lesson is – don’t base your decisions on what your target likes, base your decisions on what they do and how they do it.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #2: Social Validation
Everything is always about safety – simply put, people trust you more if they see other happy customers that are like them. This is a well-known fact – therefore don’t forget to use testimonials from clients or reviews from customers. They are much more valuable than a celebrity ad because everyone knows immediately that you paid them. Therefore in terms of conversions, users trust normal people who share their personal experience about the brand or product.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #3: The Effect of Primacy
Items that are at the beginning and end of the list are more often remembered than items in the middle. The primacy effect states that the items listed first are recalled more easily. The reason for this is that the initial items that are stored have more time to be consolidated into the long term memory. The opposite of this is the recency effect, where items on the bottom are recalled more easily; the reason for this is that these items are still fresh in the working, short term memory.
Note that short term memory can only hold around seven items. This means your navigation shouldn’t include more than seven links. If it does, try to break it up into smaller groups. Place the important elements like calls to action both at the top and the end of your page. When designing the navigation menu, do not place an important section of your website in the middle.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #4: Current and Target Knowledge
Current knowledge is the pre-existing knowledge visitors bring with them to your website. Target knowledge is what they need to access your website effectively. The knowledge gap is the difference between current knowledge and target knowledge. You need to keep this gap to a minimum when planning a layout.
Here are some examples that visitors expect to see on a website:
- The text should be aligned to the left.
- The links should have a different color from the text.
- Clicking on the logo redirects back to the homepage.
- “Contact us” should be the last link on the navigational menu.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #5: Storytelling
Jonathan Gotschall, the author of The Storytelling Animal explains that humans are addicted to stories. Stories evoke emotions, which trigger a large part of the brain’s response that makes your customers remember you. It is a proven fact that people remember information better that they read in a storytelling format, rather than in bullet points or in a normal text. An effective story normally holds the reader’s attention for a longer period of time and produces a deeper level of engagement with the brand. People love stories.
Neuroscience in Web Design Tip #6: Visuals
Over 50% of the brain is devoted to visual processing. An interesting study was conducted by usability expert James Breeze, which showed that images of faces could be used to guide people around a website. For example, when a baby is facing forward, the viewer’s attention is more strongly directed at the baby’s face. When the baby looks to the right towards the headline, the reader looks in the same direction.
Closing Thoughts
Today, web designers that incorporate neuroscientific concepts and notions in their work are truly ahead of all the rest in the industry. With the help of neuroscience, they manage to build outstanding websites that cater to audiences on an intuitive level and generate outstanding user experience.
Even though neuro design is still a new development in the web design industry, it has already become a serious, helpful tool that provides a new perspective on why it’s necessary to update and develop connections with customers regularly. Just launching a pretty website isn’t enough anymore. But today, neuro design can help you create a site that will give a substantial boost to your business, and both win and retain countless customers for you for the foreseeable future.
Need help? Our WordPress Web Design service is the perfect starting point for small to medium size businesses. Call us at 602-633-4758 for a free consultation.
Very interesting, I like your writing style.