3 Psychology Principles Every Web Designer Must know | Free Web Design Course | Episode 18

if you want to be a great web designer you need to understand the psychology of people because it's people who will be using the websites you design so in this video we're going to cover the three principles that you must understand if you want to be a great web designer it's rock and roll [Music] hey everybody and what's up my name is ron sego welcome back to our free web design course today we're going to be talking about psychology which is something so important because at the end of the day a lot of what we do as designers is to influence people right you might want not want to think about this in a kind of evil kind of way but our designs are meant to change people's mind and lead them to taking the actions that we want to lead them to now this can be done in an evil kind of way in if you look at history at propaganda but it can usually what we're doing it is for good causes or for communication but mostly just to sell stuff to people that's what usually our clients want us to do sell products or sell their companies or whatever so in order to to do that to communicate and to affect how people use the website and understand the messaging that we want to convey to them we need to understand some basic key principles about psychology and how people think and how people behave so that we can you know lead them to the conclusion that we want to to lead them through now on this video i'm going to cover the three top ones that i think that you must know if you want to get into web design at the end because there's a lot more that to learn about this i'll give you some resources if you want to dive deeper into psychology which is something that i highly recommend that you do because it's super interesting besides your design work it's just going to make you a better person interacting with other people because everybody is you know people and are affected by these psychology rules all right let's get started with principle number one so the principle number one is called mirroring what is mirroring well turns out research shows that we have uh some kind of neurons in our brain that are called mirroring neurons meaning that we act and feel according to what what other people in front of us are doing so if you see somebody's angry and they're shouting at you automatically you'll be angry and you'll probably shout back at them now you know from evolutionary perspective this was basically a way to to build empathy with other people and you'll see a lot of time when somebody is using the finger the other person in front of them will use the finger and there there's a lot of ways that we without even noticing we mirror the people that we see in front of us now why is this important in web design because in web design we'll be using a lot of imagery right we might put people happy people on the screen you know with images or sad people on the screen or people that are actually doing something like physical something on the screen now when people see this because how their brain reacts they're going to get into the mood of the other people that they're seeing in the imagery in front of them so if you want to get people into a mood of happiness or excitement you will use images of people doing these things because people will naturally without even thinking about this are going to get into the same kind of mood so this is a way to change how they feel in order to put them in the mood to convey the message that you want to convey and this is super super important in terms of the imagery and visuals that you will use in your website now the second principle is about social validation what is social validation well basically us as humans we see a lot of things in the world and most things are actually very complicated right so we in order to make decisions we're trying to really gather information very quickly is this thing a good thing or is this a bad thing is this going to hurt me or is this going to help me because things are complicated i'm looking for shortcuts to understand the answer to these questions and one of the most again based on our history and evolution one of our best ways to understand what to do is to look at what other people are doing okay so we might not admit this we might think that we make our own choices but honestly subconsciously behind our decision making a lot of times we would look to see what other people are doing is this person doing this so if he's doing this that must be smart so i want to do this as well or on the other hand if so many people are doing something that must be the right thing so instead of going deep and doing the research and thinking about this which uses a lot of brain power our brain is trying to look for the fastest way to make decisions without having to work out you know and use a lot of energy so they will look for the shortcuts and the shortcut is if other people are doing this then it must be a good thing which is called social validation and that is the reason why we will try to put as many social proofs into our website this is how testimonials comes into place this is why we put logos of famous companies that we worked with this is why we a lot of times we use numbers we have so and so customers we're generated so and so revenue because by doing this by telling them you know what other people are doing and that other people are using our service and other people have found this successful we're using this innate psychology trigger of you know of social validation to give them that shortcut and so don't think too much about this this is probably a good idea and this is information this is um this is a principle that's so important into convincing people that you are doing something good and they should trust you and that's how you again build trust in the web design that you are doing so social proof and social validation key key principle in psychology now you understand why this happens and why in all the web designs that you're seeing you're seeing all these different you know testimonials and social proof all right the third thing which is critical is the psychology of color so we the the way that we are built in our brain built and we we have we react emotionally to colors okay and we need to understand this now you know how important colors is and obviously our work is as designers is to pick the right colors but you need to understand the psychology of how these colors affect on us now some of these effects are based on like deep psychological um and even physiological effects so for example when we see the red color our our blood and you know we i become our heart rate or something goes up right and this is probably based on the fact that when you used to see blood or something like this you need to get excited so you can run or you can fight or something like that so some colors have physiological effects on us you know the the contrary to this is green which usually relaxes our body and that's why a lot of hospitals are painted green in order for people in them to relax and so we need to understand as a designer the meaning of and the psychological effect of all of these colors that we can use so that we can choose them and use them effectively on our website now one of the websites that i use as part of my research or every time i'm designing a website and i have to think about this it's because just because i don't remember all of it by height is i'm using this website which is call yourself empower yourself with cara psychology.com and while this website is super super ugly and not so well designed they have here most of the colors right you can see blue purple all of them and you can click them and get into a full on page that talks about what is the psychological effect of you know of this specific color so this is something that i would go and look into every time i'm picking colors this will also help me kind of communicate to my clients why i picked this specific color and you should definitely go through them review all the colors and then go back to this as a resource when you're designing your next project so while those were the key principles that i think that you should know and familiarize yourself with it there's definitely a lot a lot more so i want to show you this this is called the cognitive bias codex and you have here like i think 180 different biases and what does it mean biases bias it just means that your brain has a shortcut just like we talked about the social validation shortcut all of these 180 ones are shortcuts that your brain has in order to make decisions faster now the thing about these shortcuts is sometimes it helps you to make the right decisions but a lot of times it actually makes people choose the wrong decision why just because you know we're not living in the jungles or savannahs anymore and running away from tigers we're living in a different society right now but we still our brain is still wired the same way so you need to familiarize yourself with these different biases so that you can tap into them and you can understand the meaning of what you're doing using the design so of course this this is just the name of them but if you google or if you will link this below this video on wikipedia there's the list of cognitive biases and you can go ahead and click each of them to go ahead and read a little bit about all of them and this is super super interesting and also super super helpful so you don't need to you know spend years but you can spend a few minutes on each and you really you will have like an important insight that you might be able to use in your next design projects if you're not into diving through on wikipedia here's a book that i highly recommend it's called sinking fast and slow by daniel kahneman who i think is a nobel prize winner for economics and this is basically a book where there they went through and did a lot of experiments on how people think and make decision and they that's how they kind of found out and wrote about a lot of these biases um it affects you know how we buy things how we make decisions about you know what's good what's bad and and i think that most designers will benefit all designers will highly benefit from reading this and understanding the basic psychology of how our brain worked and how you know we make decisions as human beings i hope you find this video super helpful like this video subscribe this share this comment let me know what's your favorite psychology hack or cognitive bias and i will see you on the next video bye

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 81,764

Keywords: web design psychology, web design psycology, color psychology in web design, color psycology in web design, web design, psychology of website design, web design freelance, website design, web design portfolio, design psychology, color psychology, webflow, wordpress, web design online course

Id: fqDTN24HQqg

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020