Designed to Convert: How to Design a Website for Conversions

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While a small selection of websites are out there just sharing knowledge and information for the general benefit of the wider world, for most other people there is an essential need for conversions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a jewellery retailer trying to sell bracelets engraved with inspirational messages, a local government office trying to get survey responses about a new housing development, or an Islamic charity midway through Ramadan trying to encourage the faithful to use your website to calculate this year’s Zakat. Conversions are key. They are how a website moves from a mere digital presence to a useful business tool. Thus it is essential to design the page to maximise them. Using the following set of principles, that is exactly what you can do.

Hick’s Law

Choice has often been accurately described as a monster, and Hick’s law confirms that most monsters the bigger it is, the harder it is to deal with. Hick’s law is named for British psychologist William Edmund Hick, whose experiments revealed that a choice will take longer the more options exist. On the surface this might seem obvious as you have to take more time to consider all the options, but even when the option is clear and the participant knows exactly what they want to do, the arrival of many options makes making the choice more difficult.

For web designers this gets even worse when you factor in the results of a study by psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. In this study, people presented with twenty four varieties or gourmet preserves to choose from were ten percent less likely to buy anything at all, than people presented with only six options.

Can your website really afford a ten percent drop in conversion rates? If not, then the solution here is clear. Make your web design as clean and fresh as possible. Too many links and distractions will not only make a web visitor less likely to convert, but less likely to stay on the page and click on anything at all. Keep buttons to a minimum, and make your page as streamlined as possible.

Rule of Thirds

Three is very often the magic number, and web design is not any exception. Film and television have noticed that dividing up the screen into nine sections, three equal horizontal and three equal vertical, is how perception generally responds best. In cinematic productions or landscape photography, for instance, the horizon will often sit along the line dividing the lower third from the mid third. If there are any vertical elements of a picture, like a tree, a ship’s sail, or prominent rock formation, will not be in the very centre of the picture, but rather off to one side either between the left and central thirds, or the right and central third.

This principle brings up an important point. If you are wanting to draw the viewer’s attention to particular points, the best way to do so is using the points between the thirds, or even better, where the horizontal and vertical third lines intersect. These are the places that the eye is most immediately drawn to, and thus the ideal place to put buttons or links or widgets that you want people to use to result in a conversion. If you have a download link or a calculator page you want people to use, put it where a vertical and horizontal third line cross.

Pictures good, faces better

Making the page clear and putting the right buttons in the correct places is an important start, but there is also something about the overall feel and ambiance of a page that is necessary to get conversions to happen. To that end there is one thing that seems to be statistically agreed upon. Pictures. Specifically pictures of faces.

Web Designer Sabina Idler put it this way “When we see a face, we are automatically triggered to feel something or to empathize with that person. If we recognize content on a website — such as a problem, dilemma, habit or whatever else — we feel connected and understood.”

Designers of other products know this principle very well. Human brains are hardwired to look for the eyes-mouth structure, which is why so many household items have facial forms built into their designs. Everything from car headlamps to the smiling clocks and the famous 10:08 effect.

The happier your page viewers feel, the more likely they are to click where the page directs, the more conversions you will receive. Research by Bright Local has found that sixty percent of customers consider a page more favourably if it includes high resolution images, and a further twenty three percent are more likely to contact a business if their page contains images. Pictures are an excellent first step, but pictures of faces are the best way to happy, clicking page viewers.

The internet is a highly competitive place. Everyone is looking for the slightest edge to make an impact and find a way through into our thoughts and wallets. With a careful thought process and some clear design ideas, you too can make it into this difficult economic sphere.