When visitors land on your website following a natural search, visitors have certain behaviors they exhibit. How long do they stay on the website? What features appeal to them? All these questions require complete understanding of the visitor psychology.
Understanding the User Psychology
Website visitors are no different than customers who walk into a store; they take a glimpse of all the items on web page, skim through the first few lines of the text and click on a link that appeals to them. Most of the times, they skip large sections of the web page because it does not appear interesting to them. When your website design falls short on visitors’ expectations, they jump to another website they find on search engines. Web designers should understand that it is not only the web page design that matters but the quality and creditability of the content attracts immense visitor traffic. It has to be kept in mind that visitors do not go through the web page in an orderly fashion; instead they rely on what they are interested in knowing about. With scanning text rather than reading all the material, visitors want to be in control of what they do on the website. For example, they would want the hyperlink to open in the same window rather than a new one.
In order to grab your visitors and make them stay on your website for long, you need to ensure the following:
Do Not Let Users Crack the Code Themselves
A website design that is easy to decipher and doesn’t have a lot of loose ends in terms of navigation, site architecture and visual cues helps users find what they want without much trouble. A website developer must reduce the cognitive load and make it easier for the visitors to benefit from the website.
Do Not Test Your Users’ Patience
An effective website design usually has minimal user requirements. For example, in order to use a site’s service, users should not be required to fill up lengthy pages of user registration forms for something they might not even use later on. Similarly, prompting a visitor for an email address before even testing the feature doesn’t also make sense. Visitors will feel more comfortable when they are not required to subscribe or register initially to browse the website.
Make Your Users Focus on Your Web Page
Website designers should make the website design attractive to make the human eye focus on elements that need to be focused. Images catch attention rather than the text and bold text is more visible rather than plain text. You can make your visitors focus by using visual elements such as edges, patterns and motions to subtly control your user’s behavior.
Expose Your Website’s Features to the Users
From the design perspective elements such as large buttons with visual effects and 1-2-3-done-steps give a very friendly and simple way for users to interact with your website. A webpage design successfully appeal to the users when your main features or services are clearly highlighted on the webpage.
