The Connection Between Psychology And Good UX Design

Psychology is the study of the mind. If you can determine what your target customer is thinking, they are more likely to buy your product or service. Psychology can also be used to help steer and guide visitors through your application or web page. By creating a connection between psychology and good UX design, you will have a better understanding of emotions, goals, and why people behave like they do. In this article, we want to explore the link between what our customers are thinking, and how they interact with our sites.

What The Customer Is Thinking

When looking at the many links between designing a digital site and psychology, it would make sense to look at a design agency. A custom New York web design agency known as Digital Silk noticed that their conversions increased even more when they started to put themselves in the position of the customer. They break down how a customer interacts with your product with stages. Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. 

This creates a path that the user follows before a sale. By studying the path a customer takes before buying, you can clearly see where they are at and what might be needed to motivate them to take the next step. If you have been looking at working with a custom New York web design agency and you are in the area, give them a call. Digital Silk can quote to you what the site will cost and also how they can customize your site. By utilizing psychology and figuring out how to encourage your customer to move toward the next step on the conversion path, it is going to increase your bottom line and make the user flow much easier to understand.

Persona Analysis

Top design firms will tell you when you look at the intersection of psychology and design for the user, it is important to create personas. A persona is a person that doesn’t exist but has many of the qualities and thoughts you would find with a real customer. For example, say you have a site that is geared toward selling RVs. You would want to create a persona that is age 67 and just retired. An agency can even give this persona a name. Perhaps John Fairbanks from Virginia. Now you are starting to get into the mind of your potential customer.

For this person you created, what are the goals that John Fairbanks has? What kind of things does he think about? What would motivate him? Once you can understand these factors, you can use these triggers to move the customer along those steps toward a conversion.

Start with Awareness. This is the first stage of your sales funnel. Obviously, if the customer is not even aware of your product, how can they buy from you? That would not be possible. Awareness goes back to your marketing. It goes back to the ads that you are posting, and also where you are posting them.

Creating Awareness

If we tie psychology into good design, let’s consider what would catch the eye of our persona. Newly retired and looking to travel, images of National Parks might catch the eye of somebody thinking about purchasing an RV soon. Your marketing team can create groups on Facebook geared toward long-term travel. This is how you create awareness based on your target demographic.

Where are visitors looking? This data can be accumulated through heat maps and technology that tracks the vision for visitors. Couple this with psychology and images that you know will intrigue your customer base. Now you are placing ads that are going to catch the eye and also appeal to somebody that is in a position to buy an RV. Creating personas and thinking about what would appeal to your ideal customer can help you come to new conclusions.

Innovative PPC advertising companies can help drive awareness. They use constant A/B testing with their PPC models to see which images generate the most interest. When you speak with the company that is currently doing your PPC campaigns, ask to see their data. They should be able to provide to you analytics from Google and other search engines that show which creative ads are generating the most clicks. Innovative PPC advertising companies are also always trying new things.

Why Innovation Works

A new TV show is coming out with an innovative idea that has never be seen. It is generating buzz. There is a new restaurant in town you have not tried. Your group of friends is excited to try it out. Why does it seem like something new is going to be better than the products you have already tried? It comes down to psychology.

The human mind is programmed to seek out novelty. That is why we are so excited to try out your new phone. People stand in long lines to be the first to try out the latest offering from Apple. Our brain is designed to want new stimulation. Innovative PPC companies understand this. Their creative team will spend hours at the whiteboard, coming up with something customers have never seen before. It is that innovation that you need if you want to spark something in your prospective customers. 

Psychologically, you can interest people in many ways with your UX design. Post an image that puts together two disparate things. A retired man standing in front of a university with books in his hands. An image like this gets the attention of the user because they have never seen it before. Once they click on the ad, you display the tagline that once you retire is the best time to learn about the open road. As they scroll down further, you can pitch them a new RV. The potential conversion all stems from using psychology to interest the user and show them something new.

Interest

Still thinking about our sales funnel and helping customers along that path to conversion, the UI/UX designer will want to consider the psychology behind what a customer will see when they click an ad you set up on Facebook or Twitter. What is the first thing that they see? Will it grab their attention and motivate them to look below the fold?

Going back to our persona of a recently retired male that is looking to do extended travel, an image of a person in that demographic standing at the top of Half Dome after a long day hike would be very intriguing. Test out how this image plays out with your customers. Utilizing services such as UserTesting.com, you can ask your user how they feel when they see the image. Does it make them want to know more? Now you are no longer just guessing about what your customer is experiencing. You have data that you can begin to accumulate. 

Converting

So we have discussed how we can use the customer journey and interesting ads to get a customer on our site. Now that your novel PPC has worked, how do you actually close the sale? It is great to use innovative PPC advertising companies to get more visitors. This will be worthless to you unless they actually complete the sale. A custom New York design agency can help, but many of the ways to increase conversions are on your main page or the landing page.

Looking at psychology once again, is it clear what path the customer is going to take once they are on your landing page? You have expended money on PPC and creative ads to get them over to your site, but have you streamlined the buying process to make sure that they reach the goal? This can be emphasized in a few ways.

Hick’s Law

As the UI/UX designer, it may feel that giving the customer more choices is always the right option. People like choices and feeling that they are in control. While this is true, psychologically you can at times give your customer too many options on the page or in the app. Hick’s Law identified the relationship between having more options when buying a product and then extending out the time it takes for the customer to come to a conclusion.

A customer buying shoes in the store will be happy to see a pair they want to buy in four or five different colors. A huge wall with over a hundred different choices can become confusing. Some customers will take so long trying to come to a decision, they will decide it is just not worth it anymore and move on. 

Designers for websites need to take this into account when they are making their site. Do you give the impression you are presenting your customer with a giant wall of options? Will the effect be compounded when they move to the next page and you give them the option to create personalized images, messages, and also colors? Remember, when we look at the flow that the consumer is taking from Awareness to Action, you need to keep the customer moving. If they stagnate too long at any one step, it can cause them to become uninterested in the process. Looking at Hick’s Law can help you keep things simple while also giving the impression the customer has many choices at the same time.

In Conclusion

Wrapping up, we just touched the surface of the connection between the mind and good UI. We hope we have given you some tips and tricks that you can use in your next user flow. Continue to come back for future guides and articles.