Whether by accident or design the web industry as a whole already makes widespread use of psychology as a commercial science. Existing applications where psychological insights often support web designers include conducting useability tests to increase clickthroughs and targeting specific audiences with the aid of demographic data harvesting.
Larger companies are able to buy expensive laboratory reports and employ psychologists to interpret web design data. However, many web designers, developers and graphic designers have neither the time nor the funding to invest in making use of psychological testing on a regular basis.
That doesn’t mean that most designers have no access to psychological knowledge, but their sources may be focused on the snapshots offered by metrics and laboratory studies. These quantitative approaches can provide useful information, but such information becomes much more reliable when it’s backed-up by qualitative data collected under natural conditions.
In addition, the scope of a web design business typically goes beyond design skills into areas such as client relationships, branding and business management. As a result, there may be so many sources of psychological snippets that it becomes difficult to see the wood for the trees without someone to help by providing an overview.
Picture Credit: Webmuseum.
This article proposes that designers may find a competitive advantage not in setting aside their existing knowledge, but through steadily broadening their psychological skill sets. In particular, it may be practical to develop an awareness of knock-on effects and different psychological approaches, which can be used as a toolkit to advise clients of pitfalls and opportunities that other designers may not be able to anticipate.
It’s suggested that this can be done, at little expense and with measurable returns, by using sources that offer accessible overviews and by experimenting with the type of easily integrated, but awareness-raising, designs offered in the examples presented below.
Most of the sites under discussion keep the statistical results of using psychological design elements under wraps. However, the very existence of corporate data harvesters, and examples of web designs that press visitors’ psychological ‘buttons’, suggests that many companies see a good return on any investment in psychology.
In more concrete terms, it’s possible for any designer to use a range of sources, such as forum activity, customer feedback, science magazines or blogs, repetition and metrics to evaluate outcomes. Among such sources some of the most useful data is likely to result from getting used to tracking the feedback and metrics from your own projects.
A Competitive Edge
Providing the testing or measurement is relevant and consistent, science distinguishes itself from common sense and hearsay by putting ideas up for test. As a result, thorough science is more reliable than alternatives like common knowledge or common usage.
The reliability of scientific data and psychological interpretations of such data may well explain much of the use of metrics and demographic data within e-commerce. It, therefore, seems slightly surprising to carry out a web search on psychology and web design to find so many pages reviewing the psychological effects of using a particular color within a web design.
Many of these sites list the colors of the rainbow alongside a series of moods or atmospheres the same colors are thought to evoke. A proportion of the same sites also cover either a slightly wider range of colors or try to make connections between specific colors and possible web design applications. For instance, blue is often considered cool and corporate.
Picture Credit: SXC.
Most designers already know that this particular approach to dabbling in psychology and trying to make connections to web design doesn’t always work, because few sites rely on a single color and an isolated color looks very different when placed next to other colors.
Under these circumstances an experienced web designer usually refers to past designs for similar clients, current web design trends and software applications like Adobe’s Kuler; all of which stir-up ideas and aid the selection of a suitable palette. At first glance it looks like all the bases are covered, but there may be more to consider.
For example, let’s imagine a US-based web designer who wishes to move from a local client base to a more flexible international clientele. There are many cultural differences and expectations which make designing for a global audience more challenging and color is certainly once of these.
Psychological evidence that different cultures see the same colors differently and interpret them in different ways has been available for some time. The existence of such preferences might make our web designer in the US want to compare US and Italian color preferences before pitching for a contract to build a fashion site for a company based in Milan.
Color offers an example, but recent research on synaesthesiacs, (who experience a blending of the senses where, for example, letters may be processed as having their own colors or tastes), puts a very different complexion on our understanding of all of our sensory perceptions. It was thought that some synaesthesiacs’ experience of colors, (as expressed to them in terms of taste or scent), involved tangled or overlapping sensory inputs. However, recent experimental evidence suggests that personal meanings and interpretations heavily customize our sensory inputs.
If, as the research suggests, our perceptions are highly attuned to culture, then web design companies with access to such information are likely to see opportunities to designs for very specific cultural and social preferences. That in turn leads to the expectation that their web designers will use fonts, languages, color schemes – and all the rest, with a regard for more local and, in some ways, more individual psychological preferences.
Does the typical web designer have the time or money to access reliable science? The answer seems to be yes, if a designer wishes to compete in certain markets and yes, providing a designer boosts or augments their existing skills by weighing-up different types of evidence.
Picture Credit: SXC.
If we return to the example of color, a designer may not be able to find reliable local information posted in articles about web design, but she/ he can look to the fashion, comic and videogame industries which all rely on following and setting demographic color trends. The information these industries use to select color schemes is commercially sensitive, but their advertisements, previews, promotions and products show the results where any web designer can access them.
Clearly, this approach to tapping into psychological evidence is not about setting-up or sifting through academic studies. Instead, it’s about drawing on a wider pool of ideas and evidence to inform our designs. The following psychological topics, and design options, therefore, seem worth considering in terms of building skill sets and portfolios.
Persuasion
Clients are typically looking for web designers to come up with designs capable of persuading website visitors to explore a site’s content, then gravitate towards points of sale and, hopefully, close a sale. At the same time clients are often expecting web designers to bring visitors back to the site and, ideally, to engage them in helping to form a site-specific online community.
Experienced designers have a stock of design techniques and technologies which they can deploy to prototype for clients and to persuade visitors. These probably aren’t written down anywhere and are likely to change in keeping with a design world influenced by web design trends focused on emergent technologies. Many of these web design skills may only be understood in terms of design techniques, but they’re often based on applying the psychology of persuasion.
Form design is an obvious example of an area of web design where many designers already have the psychological skills to persuade clients and visitors to follow their lead. Any designer who researches current trends in form design and checks the latest corporate practices should, therefore, be able to present a persuasive web form.
Where additional psychology-related input may be more relevant to web designers is when trying to reach into other, less immediately supported areas of design practice, or when trying to take web designs into unfamiliar areas.
Under such circumstances it may be tempting to buy a book about sales and marketing, or to read the biography of a hugely successful e-commerce tycoon. In truth, blogs and magazines in the popular science category are probably more likely to help, as these often feature articles on psychology that are highly effective at making hard science easier to absorb.
Familiarity
One of the most widely used approaches to persuasion applied across many media concerns the business of softening the boundaries between maintaining a familiar grounding in reality and opening up imaginative narratives.
Videogames, comics and books based on fixed narratives are already heavily reliant on drawing readers into predetermined storylines, and keeping them there, by striking a balance between familiarity or authenticity and novelty. Go too far towards familiarity and there’s no imaginative spark; go too far towards novelty and viewers’ run short of comfortable narrative touchstones including genre and structure.
Juggling website visitors’ expectations to persuade through offering a balance between the authentic or familiar and the imaginative becomes all the more important when designing with the interactive media found in many websites, because the interactions can be so dynamic. For example, visitors who aren’t familiar with opportunities for rapidly interacting with and adapting to the narratives within websites can be drawn outside their comfort zone by the options used to sustain the interest of experienced users.
Picture Credit: Chameleon
The types of steps a web designer can take to help to meet visitors’ expectations and offer familiarity can be illustrated by a WordPress plug-in called Chameleon. Many sites with a particular focus, such as Halloween or Christmas, already use styling and familiar media and media interactions to break down boundaries. For example, a Halloween-focused site usually has an autumnal color scheme, while a Christmas-focused site typically allows visitors to send e-cards. This is an effective way to use familiarity to make new and seasonal visitors feel connected to and comfortable with a site from the word go.
More recently, offering visitors one-click CSS auto-styling buttons has allowed instant access to styling for accessibility and decoration. This is the kind of approach to the persuasive use of familiarity and/ or authenticity opened-up by Chameleon. However, the plug-in operates on a level where even novice designers can easily incorporate such features within a design.
Chameleon swaps webpage CSS stylings in much the same way as auto-styling buttons or panels. However, the plug-in is all about automating the loading of designers’ stylings during the day, month or year. As a result, a nocturnal styling can always appear to visitors after dark or a site can be covered in star-spangled banners on July 4th – only to return to normal the next day. This level of customization may have been viewed as a gimmick a few years ago, but companies selling seasonal offerings now make extensive use of timed re-stylings throughout the year.
Picture Credit: Amazon.com
Through Chameleon, seasons, celebrations and calendars can all be triggered as required to provide a familiarity that consistently softens the boundaries between the the real and the virtual. There’s also no need to stick to standard timings, as fictional or site-driven event stylings can also be triggered to take visitors further into a site’s narratives.
There are other ways to arrive at the same result, but in the example given it’s noticeable that no complex coding skills or exhaustive re-designs are required to make a web design more persuasive. Remote-controlled auto-styling can, therefore, be delivered not by the web designer with the best technical skills, but by the designer with an awareness of psychological considerations and how to apply them to design work.
Language
Persuasion, including building on familiarity, is rooted in language – and psychology has a lot to offer in terms of developing our understanding of language. The written word alone is a very demanding area where, for example, over-complexity excludes many visitors.
However, as shown by Chameleon, language and communication goes far beyond working with text to deliver static narratives. Outdated notions about only using 10% of our brains at one time and the primacy of communication through body language have been replaced by an awareness of how our highly systemic brains work with, and adapt to, countless approaches to communication.
As a result, language and communication can be thought of in terms of snowballing narratives politicized by personal and social experience. The more a web design does to take account of this and dovetail with visitors’ narratives by using language at and across many levels the greater the chances of encouraging visitors to come back.
Picture Credit: Tagul
It’s possible to consider the likely benefits of a greater awareness of systemic thinking and understanding language as flexible narratives by looking at the written word alone. Font sizes, font families and font decorations are the typical starting points for delivering messages and persuading website visitors. The complexity of the text and its relevance to the audience are also common considerations when designing websites.
These are important considerations, but Wordle provides an example of how text can communicate on further levels through the orientation, spatial distribution and easy re-configuration of typography. Going a step further, Tagul allows the design of link clouds, which look like Wordle output but also allow a web designer to connect to content that’s relevant to the link text – and, therefore, capable of shaping understanding of the link cloud as a whole.
Along similar lines, the many other layers of language involved in communicating through web design cannot be viewed in isolation and web designers may find further competitive advantage in becoming increasingly aware of the manner in which every element of a web design contributes to the narratives a site shares with its visitors.
Intersubjectivity
Good use of language to persuade clients and website visitors may lie in establishing an intersubjectivity where visitors are treated as part of a community that shares common values and expectations. Designers may be particularly interested in this area of psychology, because it concerns the ways in which individuals participating in social activities frequently get drawn into collective behaviors. For instance, the influence of collective behaviors could be seen at Stalinist rallies, where no one would stop clapping for fear of the consequences.
A novice web designer may seem to be largely concerned with persuading individuals, as both the client and the designer envisage a site’s first priority as persuading each individual visitor to make a sale. There might also be less concern over building a sense of community if a website’s content or services don’t appear to offer a platform for community interactions. Equally, a client may not be prepared to invest in community-building, because the client doesn’t appreciate the long-term benefits of bringing visitors, regular visitors and webmasters together.
More experienced designers, possibly working with larger organizations, are likely to have community-building much nearer the top of their design priorities and skill sets. Their awareness of how to go about designing online communities may not be referred to in terms of intersubjectivity; but the building of shared understandings, the development of a sense of participation, the delivery of services to meet collective expectations and, hopefully, the creation of a commonality of purpose are all about encouraging the shared understandings of intersubjectivity.
Designers with a keen awareness of intersubjectivity typically use a variety of platforms and applications to develop intersubjectivity within their designs. This may start with catering for individual tastes up to a point; through style-switching, interface work-flows, differentiated content and streamlined navigation. These types of design elements deliver a better fit between a site and its visitors, which can support the development of intersubjectivity on a community level through the addition of feedback forms, forums, memberships, reward systems and webmaster interventions.
Picture Credit: vBulletin
With community options built into a website’s business plan from the outset a visitor is not left to the metaphorical equivalent of arriving at a new house to view an empty, undecorated and unfurnished house. Instead, everyone who’s ever stayed in the property is waiting by the door to welcome you in and the door opens to reveal a beautifully furnished and decorated home – all of which can be adjusted at the flick of a switch.
While the inclusion of community-building options allows sites to foster a significant degree of intersubjectivity between a website, its visitors and between the visitors themselves, the psychological options aren’t exhausted at that stage. Web designers open to developing their psychological skill sets may also wish to, figuratively, light a fire in the house’s fireplace, put a cat on the rug and greet visitors with the aromas of freshly ground coffee and baking bread.
The means to design sites in such a manner have already been set out in terms of the options for applying an awareness of psychology to persuade through creative approaches to combining and delivering familiarity, language and intersubjectivity within web designs. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this methodology is to take a look at a website which has already applied most or all of the psychological options under discussion. The designers may or may not have some psychological training, but it is clear that they have psychological skill sets that are highly relevant to their web design.
CoffeeCup Software sell a range of web design software on a site that covers all of the design essentials in terms of presenting an uncluttered, easily-navigated interface. The consistent use of attractively-styled icons adds to the site’s appeal and the core message is, ‘use our software and your pages can look like ours’.
Picture Credit: CoffeeCup
Using your website to demonstrating how good your products are offers a promising start, but it’s a fairly tall order to go on to combine persuasiveness, meaningful familiarity, innovative use of language and a sense of shared purpose within one coherent design model. Not least because visitors don’t always appreciate promotional content, visitors rarely choose to reminisce over their chosen web editor and visitors may be reluctant to sign-up to support forums unless they need support immediately. In view of the latter, the better the software a company like CoffeeCup sells, the less chance they appear to have of building community and opportunities to promote intersubjectivity.
Fortunately, the company’s Easter Egg Hunt web design delivers on every level, with a compelling basic design providing a platform for a site-wide hunt for free software disguised in the form of concealed Easter Egg icons. The promotion’s design doesn’t disrupt the standard interface, choosing instead to conceal the eggs within the overall design.
The connection, not only with Easter, but with traditional family activities staged at Easter, including both the decoration of eggs and hunting for eggs, offers more than enough familiarity to go round. At the same time the need to explore the site’s language in the search for eggs turns a support forum into a frenzied search for genuinely valuable items.
As a result, visitors pour into a support forum for a software company and start to share the hunt, their experiences of the hunt and their experience of dealing with CoffeeCup and their products. Opportunities to promote further intersubjectivity arrive with the visitors and the design succeeds in going on to use intersubjectivity to ‘close the deal’.
The familiarity and authenticity borrowed from connections to a traditional Easter activity is taken and turned back on itself to send the gameplay right back out into the real world. This is achieved by combining the virtual entertainment with tangible products and the subsequent delivery of those products into the real world as functional products. This circuit is most complete when a winner may jump up in celebration upon gaining a prize or a friend gives the winner pat on the back as the software is downloaded. From there it’s likely the winner will post the good news back into the community and stir-up further emotional reactions.
The cryptic searches and encoded messages used for the Easter Egg Hunt may seem a bit much for a casual visitor, but the website’s potential clients are web designers and software coders – who better to decipher messages and solve problems with lateral thinking.
There’s also a further bonus for the web company, as the shared understandings of intersubjectivity are strongly associated with effective learning. In other words, the Easter Egg hunters are learning to use the site’s navigation, learning to search the site for solutions and learning to like the company for entertaining them.
Conclusion
At present web design is focused on design trends, new technology platforms and interactive wizardry. There is already a considerable psychological awareness within the web design community, which is brought to bear in the designs of experienced designers.
Whether inadvertently or not, this psychological awareness is already used to competitive advantage by innovative designers. It follows that it’s reasonable to expect any area of design which offers an advantage to become more mainstream within any industry.
Consequently, designers may wish to consider how even a small range of psychological considerations can combine to deliver more visitors and more clients. There might be more room for delay if it was difficult or time-consuming to develop an awareness of the role of psychology within design, but popular science titles and the best psychology blogs serve-up a lot of relevant psychological information in palatable formats. Sites like Mashable, Lifehacker, Smashing Magazine and BoingBoing also touch on psychological topics, as shown by BoingBoing’s coverage of the research on synaesthesia discussed earlier.
Alternatively, a design agency could raise awareness of psychology among staff by circulating some of the excellent science and design infographics available on the Internet. This could be done by email, through handouts or as part of company training or presentations.
On a final note, there are limits to the socially acceptable, legally permitted and ethically agreeable use of psychological techniques to persuade or sell. It’s well worth considering this before finalizing any design, as the Internet can have a more stable and persistent memory than any human.
Further Resources
Colour and cultures infographic.
The National Science Foundation’s site is one of many places worth searching for high quality science infographics.
New Scientist: ‘Kiki or bouba? In search of language’s missing link‘ discusses research concerning synaesthesia.
BoingBoing: ‘Synesthesia and the origins of language‘.
PsyBlog is an excellent popular science psychology blog, which showcases how psychological experiments relate to the real world.
Science Daily is a site worth signing-up to. They covered the recent research on synaesthesia and perception with a post that presented a very accessible approach to the topic.
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