Over the years, companies have researched and studied many different behaviors of human interaction with websites to determine which elements on the site lead to better user experience and ultimately conversions. Many tests have been done to find the right combinations of visual and content structures.
1)Simplicity and Symmetry – Our minds prefer the clear, simple and orderly, as opposed to the complex and complicated. Actually, our minds kind of ‘turn off’ when something gets too complicated. I guess you can call it brain overload.
Now imagine you spent all that time, money, and effort driving qualified traffic to your site only to have their brains shut down once they get there. Brain overload. Not an optimal situation.
Your site’s structure, design, and content should be super simple. Put it this way, if a truck driver can understand it then so can a brain surgeon, but not the other way around.
Make sure your site’s structure is clear, easy to navigate, and in a logical order.
2)Humans Are Creatures Of Habit – A famous principle in psychology states that humans do what they are used to doing. Even if a new way of doing something would be better, humans will generally choose to just go with the way they are used to.
Sure, that cool icon in place of the “Buy Now” button makes your website stand out and look better than the competitor’s site, but people click Buy Now buttons more often than they click cool icons. Your competition is getting clicks while you are just getting the ooh’s and aah’s. Same goes for the Add to Cart and Checkout buttons, as well as menu items such as Pricing and About Us. Don’t be clever and original when people expect boring and the same.
3)Optical Illusions – In the optical illusion below, can you tell which line is longer?
At first glance, our brains would have us think that the second line is longer but when measured you can see that they are actually both the exact same length.
Our brains see the “shorter” route and would choose to take that path.
So how do we use this optical illusion on our website?
Buttons. Large buttons. When a user’s mouse is somewhere on the webpage their brain automatically “calculates” the relative distance to the action buttons. A large button will appear to be only 2-4 buttons worth of distance away while a small button could be 10-15 buttons worth of distance away from the mouse.
Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true! Look at all the major sites, the buy now or other action buttons are large while the return, refund, cancel, etc buttons (usually not even buttons but just little links) are small. This illusion makes the preferred actions seem close and easy to get to while the non-preferred actions seem so far away.
With these new tips in mind, review your site to find areas of improvement. Is anything unclear or too complex? Does the structure flow smoothly? Creating order and simplifying your site will lead to big gains off the bat.
Is your site ‘too creative’ to the point that you are losing sales? Switch gears and follow the norm of what people are accustomed to and watch the conversions soar.
Lastly, make the good stuff big and the bad stuff small… in a nutshell..
