A month and a half ago I wrote an article that dealt with website psychology and the importance of incorporating effective design within any website to promote a valuable and highly interactive user experience. I thought it was worth taking a second look at.

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Web design has come a long way over the past 5 years. With the emergence of new technologies, more bandwidth, and faster browsers, designers have had opportunities they have never had before. The emergence of new programming mediums such as video streaming, flash, silverlight, and CSS technologies have opened up new design initiatives across all web portals. With new opportunity come more choices and more possibilities to relay information to the end user. As a result of these new opportunities, web designers must decide the most efficient ways to engage the user and incorporate a meaningful design without overwhelming or taking away from the end user experience. It has become a balancing act to effectively and creatively communicate the meaning of the web site while maintaining purpose and direction.

Prior to beginning the new design of a website it is important to understand the fundamental basics behind human psychology while engaging in a media medium. An aesthetically pleasing experience is just the beginning of what is important to users. The users must be guided in a way that pulls their eyes and interest from one point to the next. By studying the basic fundamentals of eye flow in mainstream media, we can use the current data in conjunction with design to relay a message to the user. When a user initially opens a website, their eyes immediately look to the upper left corner, then across to the right, then at a 45 degree angle back to the left, and lastly across to the bottom right corner. As you can tell this creates an eye follow chart in the form of the letter “Z”. All of these eye actions are performed prior to a user scrolling down to view the remainder of the screen. A good designer will use these instinctive motions, displaying all of the more important information up top, and leave the less imperative information in the bottom portion of the browser window, also known as the “fold” point.

Once you have properly structured the content of your index, and possibly interior pages, your next goal is to properly create the atmosphere surrounding your brand, community, culture, overall attitude, and message you are trying to relay. This is very important as first impressions are everything and if the message you relay does not agree with the user, chances are they will leave and not return. The focus of a sites design is pleasing the user, so abiding to a design strategy that centers a model on the interests and character of the users is crucial. Knowing your audience, how technical they are, and how far you will need to go to keep them engaged can play a major role in the initial design of a website.

Keeping the users in mind a good web designer will extract the overall temperament of its users. Let’s look at a more famous example, MySpace vs. Facebook. Myspace clearly drives the younger of the two audiences. Their overall design is cluttered, riddles with flashing banner ads and interactive marketing campaigns. They allow users to customize their homepages, which plays to the desire of their users to differentiate themselves to all of their friends. Their design plays directly to their audience. MySpace’s users are usually teens, still discovering their own identity and looking to convey their new found individuality to the entire community. Their attention is grabbed much more efficiently through colorful, flashing, interactive ads that require little or no thinking, which is why their site is littered with them. Now, on the other hand, we have Facebook. An equally interactive website but it has a completely different design. The overall blueprint is a simple one, organization and simplicity is very present. The users of Facebook are older, more sophisticated and established. They are not looking to customize their pages with colors and wallpapers, but still want to share their pictures, experiences, and build a community. Advertising is completely integrated, with very few banner style ads being pushed to users. When you take a step back, both sites are highly successful and within a very similar industry, but both have spent countless hours learning their audience and planning accordingly. Make sure you recognize and understand your audience before engaging them.

There are many psychological aspects to creating a website and these are simply some of the larger and more important aspects. We have also posted on the psychological effects of color contained within websites. As technology continues to develop and more analytical data is gathered, there will be additional in depth studies into the minds of web users and what attracts or disengages them from particular designs.

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What I did not touch on within this article that is important to mention, is the fact that an effective web design comes second to the proper organizational structure. The most important aspect to a well designed website is the organization of interaction and the ability to facilitate the interaction of users. Design elements, as mentioned above, are important; however they must be incorporated within a properly organized and structured flow. The user must be guided with both design and overall configuration to properly guide a user freely through the conversion process. This entire process and the overall structure and layout of any website should be laid out prior to any new online project.