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An effective web developer knows that psychology principles play a role in superior design. This may seem counterintuitive. Still, a website is a marketing tool, and marketing principles rely heavily on psychology principles. Your client may want to focus only on aesthetics, and aesthetics are important. But, the website needs to convert visitors into customers.

So, your web developer is really helping you design your website for your specific target customer. It’s important to convey the information to your website developer, and the information needs to go beyond scraping the surface of who the audience is. This means understanding how your target customer thinks and responds to websites.

A lot of this is explained by psychology principles.

Key Psychology Principles to Use in Deb Design

Aesthetics-Usability Effect

The Aesthetics-Usability Effect says that people respond better to aesthetically pleasing designs. They make the assumption that an attractive interface means a more usable interface. A clean, good, modern, responsive design should be the starting point.

Loss Aversion

Loss Aversion states that decision-making is more commonly driven by avoiding losses than acquiring gains. This is precisely why your website needs to convey trustworthiness. Your visitors need to feel confident in making the decision to buy. Otherwise, you may have high abandonment rates.

Gestalt Principles

Gestalt Principles are a way for humans to make sense of chaotic data presented to them. So, rather than seeing a confusion of images, text, and negative space, the human brain seeks out patterns to make sense of the complex. Other psychology principles are related to Gestalt, and they focus on elements like similarity, symmetry, and proximity.

Color Psychology

Color psychology is about color’s influence over how something is perceived. Color is strongly tied to emotion, so it affects how visitors perceive a website and the brand behind it.

Psychology of Shapes

Just as a color has the ability to affect someone’s perception of a brand or the content they’re looking at, so too do individual shapes used within an interface. Each shape has a unique psychological association.

Mere-Exposure Effect/Jakob’s Law

The Mere-Exposure Effect, or Familiarity Principle, suggests that people are more likely to prefer things that seem familiar. Jakob’s Law applies this psychology specifically to the internet user experience. It suggests that users expect your website to work the same way as the other sites they spend their time on.

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law states that the number of choices a person has to make will increase the amount of time it takes to make a decision. This is a fundamental principle to pay attention to on eCommerce sites as you want to speed up the decision-making process, not slow it down.

Paradox of Choice

The Paradox of Choice is a response to the problem posited by Hick’s Law. It suggests that the reduction of choices makes consumers feel less anxious, which, in turn, increases confidence and satisfaction with purchases. If your site experiences high cart abandonment, you might want to look into this principle.

Miller’s Law

Miller’s Law, also referred to as Cognitive Load Theory, has to do with memory capacity. On average, people can only have about seven items stored in their working memory at any given time. This psychology principle encourages the reduction of options and the general reduction of content to improve focus and decision-making capabilities. In other words, a clean design is more productive than a cluttered design.

Final Thoughts

Do you want to help your web developer design a better, more productive website? Of course. Then, you need to design from the end users’ perspective. The best place to start is with psychology principles, as they’ll tell you how your target customers think and what motivates them to respond.

Look for a web developer who understands the psychology behind decision-making on a website. Contact NOYO Web Development for more information.