Design tips

Design with Visual Hierarchy

There is a visual hierarchy on every page. The visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement, shape, colour, and contrast of visual elements. This determines their relative prominence and the order in which your user sees. You can achieve visual hierarchy by presenting a large and bold title at the top of the webpage, and the small legal information below to prioritize certain elements over others. Web design is not just about adding elements to your website, but also how you add it matters a lot. Web designers use a visual hierarchy, which draws audience attention to key elements. Elements such as position, size, visuals, and contrast can all increase or decrease engagement. Take a look at this chart that is showing how to attract or deflect attention. By combining aspects their effect increases manifold. Everyone will see a large video, which is high on the page. Some people will see low contrast text around images. The visual hierarchy is so that your eyes follow a certain path on every page you visit on the Internet. When used intentionally, it captures the visitor’s attention through a series of messages towards the call to action.

Keep your Website’s Homepage free of clutter

A cluttered screen is one of the most common mistakes in web design. Many people simply throw what they want on their website on the screen without knowing any better. If you include too many distracting elements on your site, your visitors will have difficulty seeing where to look and you will end up losing a consistent experience. Conversely, if you include only the necessary elements, those elements are more powerful as they do not need to share the centre stage. Did you know that 86% of visitors want information about products or services on the homepage? The homepage of your website should communicate your original message immediately. After all, we rarely read every word on a website. Instead, we quickly scan the page by looking at sentences and pictures. There should be a clear path for the user to follow in order to make an effective web design. There are many different ways to achieve this, but the first step is to always make room for higher priority elements by removing lower priority ones. Just follow the simple website design tips given below to make for a presentable homepage design:

  • Space out your content
  • Add imagery
  • Include a call-to-action button With these known behaviours in mind, it is better to take help from the web development company in India. They will help you design websites that maximize conversions with low bounce rates.

Mention scarcity, trigger “loss aversion

Humans are not efficient cost/benefit calculators. We tend to overvalue losses and undervalue gains. In other words, losses are more painful than gains are pleasurable. This is true online and offline and explains a lot of human behavior. This article explains it well: Applying Behavioral Economics And Cognitive Psychology to the Design Process. This aversion to losses can be useful to web designers and copywriters. Here are some tips for writing copy with loss aversion in mind.

  • Emphasize the costs of not using your product or service.
  • Group costs together, list benefits separately.
  • Emphasize immediate gains.
  • Create urgency with limited time offers. If the product is scarce, say so.
Gently remind your visitors what they’ll miss, risk or lose by not taking action right now.

Add evidence and social proof

The “conformity bias” is the human tendency to do what other people are doing. So giving evidence that others have selected you makes choosing your company seem like a good choice. The goal is to make any decision other than using your company seem outside the norm. Give your visitors proof that you’re legitimate. Ideally, every one of your marketing claims is supported with evidence.

Answer the visitors’ top questions

They came with questions. The main job of the website is to answer those questions. Every unanswered question is a missed opportunity to build trust. Unanswered questions also increase the likelihood that the visitor will leave. When Joel Klettke applied his process finding questions and writing answers, he was able to double the conversion rates on Hubspot landing pages. He interviewed customers, analyzed their answers, prioritized the messages and in the end, he used the words of the audience themselves in the new marketing copy. Smart! Here are the questions Joel uses to discover visitors’ top questions:

  • What was happening that sent you looking for a solution?
  • What else did you try and what didn’t you love about it?
  • What almost kept you from buying from us?
  • What made you confident enough to give us a try?
  • What made X the best solution for you?
  • When evaluating X, what was most important to you?
  • What can you do now (or do better) that you couldn’t do before?
  • Give me an example of when X made a difference for you?
In one word, what is the purpose of your website? Answer.

Additional reading: The Perfect B2B Website Service Page: 13-Point Checklist

List Order and “Serial Position Effect

When ordering any lists within your copy, put the important stuff at the beginning and end. The reader’s’ attention and retention are lowest in the middle of any list. As visitors scan the page, the first and the last items are most likely to stay in short-term memory. Source: Order Effects Theory: Primacy versus Recency

Avoid jargon. Use simple words.

The easier it is the read, the more successful the website will be. Use the common words that visitors expect. Long sentences and fancy words force the temporal lobe to work harder. That’s not good.

Avoid long paragraphs and long line length

Long, blocky paragraphs do not align with digital content best practices. Simply breaking up long paragraphs makes the content easier to consume. As a general rule, don’t write paragraphs longer than 3-4 lines.

Write meaningful subheads

Vague subheads are everywhere. They are often large and useless but followed by things that are small but useful. Strange, right? The opposite would make more sense. Make sure that the big things are meaningful and helpful to visitors. If your subheaders say things like “products” or “services,” ask yourself if a more descriptive term would be more helpful. Here are some examples. This is good for scanners and usability. It’s good for the visually impaired and accessibility. It’s also good SEO best practices. Never miss a chance to indicate relevance! ProTip: Subheads may be completely unnecessary. Would this page be just as good without it? Would visitors still know what they’re looking at? If so, just remove it.

Avoid using social media icons in your website header

Similarly, colorful social media icons in your header isn’t great for your goals. If visitors click on any of those candy-colored buttons, they land on a site filled with distractions. They are unlikely to come back. This is generally the wrong way to do social media integration. If you link to a social network, do so from your footer. Visitors can find the social networks if they’re looking, but you’re not suggesting that they leave.