News & Insights

Tapping on emotions to build an effective website

Through your website’s visual components, you can build positive and memorable brand impressions!

Besides quality of content and ease of use, websites should also be able to elicit a user’s emotions with the appropriate use of colour, images, shapes, typeface and overall graphical elements, to evoke enjoyment, trust and satisfaction. This aspect should also be known as the ‘affective’ elements of design!

How aesthetics and layout affect user emotions

Emotions can be either positive or negative, and triggered in the user based on his or her interactions with the site’s visual elements. This is particularly relevant for e-commerce shopping sites, as a negative emotional response might influence landing users’ decision to stick around on your website or leave (resulting in a higher ‘bounce rates’) and even cart abandonment.

It is also important to know where to place various design elements of your website. For instance, a navigation menu that is hard to locate is likely to confuse and may even annoy your user.

Applying social elements to engage emotions

Since each interaction is a chance to engage your user, website designers and developers need to build emotions into their site through the use of human-centred pictures and emotive text to enhance user impressions and improve reader’s overall sense of satisfaction, enjoyment and trust.

Here are a few tips to help you evoke positive user emotions:

1. Consistent colour theme
Make sure elements (e.g. colour) are consistent throughout

2. Image size and placement
Images that appear closer and larger will be interpreted as being more important. The proximity of web images also influences how users perceive them, generally those closer to the visual field are more impactful. To add, choice of imagery should also be relevant to the context so site visitors won’t have to second guess why the image is present.

3. Use a suitable font
This simple design choice can impact how your site visitors feel about your brand, as formal font types can convey professionalism and less formal typefaces connote novelty. It is important to select a font that aligns with your corporate image.

4. Inject brand personality
Infuse a little humor into your website on 404 error pages or interactive visual elements, such as a sliding meter for user feedback

Take note that the site interface’s useability is not compromised, so that user navigation does not become an issue even when you include novel graphical elements as part of the message you want to convey.

Need help to design an evocative website that is aesthetically pleasing yet functionally intuitive…? With help from web designers who possess both the UI design skills and UX expertise, you can create an effective website that strikes the right emotional bond with your target audience. Leave your web design to the professionals so you can focus on core aspects of your business!