Just imagine the place where you are sitting right now and if a bomb drops right now, you don’t make a logical decision whether to take the exit route or jump or run. You simple do whatever first comes to your mind. A website is similar. It is bombarding information, colors, patterns, whitespaces and more and that information is evoking emotions inside the brain resulting in an instant decision. I read that around 10 years ago in a book on website design and it stuck with me for long on the power of web design. Recently I came across something even more fascinating “Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million”. Is web design that powerful?

<strong>Communication on the web</strong>
According to Psychology Today human communication is said to be 90% non-verbal. That means when you meet somebody your body language and other non-verbal communication has already done the majority of communication. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s studies from the late 1960s in California assert that communication is made up of 3 components: words, tone of voice, and body language. His works indicate that words (verbal communication) only make up 7% of the sender’s message – that tone of voice (vocal communication) accounts for 38% and body language (visual communication) the other 55%, for a total of 93% of the message coming from non-verbal cues.

Interestingly in case of a website all this communication has to be done by the website. Which means 100% communication has to be done visually. According to Sudhindra V., Creative Director & Experience Design Lead, SapientNitro India “Decision making as we call it is a series of cognitive processes that people go through that include both rational and emotional aspects of human mind. The online world has fundamentally shifted this interaction. In the e-commerce world, there is not the human but a machine that you interact with. A machine that can analyze large amounts of data in seconds and that can fetch information from any nook and corner of the world. But it lacks the warmth of a human being, a natural reassurance of a friend. The attempt of the interface is to bridge this gap for its users – between the rational technology and the emotional human being operating it.”
<strong>The Impact of Design</strong>

<strong>The case of $300 button</strong>
According to Jared Spool in User Interface Engineering It is hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

<strong>What is Good Design?</strong>
That brings forth to the most important question. What is good design?
According to Nytimes.com Some of the world’s leading designers were challenged to define what “good design” means in a debate at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum a few years ago. Everyone agreed that “good design” had to fulfill its function efficiently.

In Itunes a purchase is one simple click. In Amazon.com it takes just one click to buy a Kindle book. Yet to arrive at the point of purchase a website has to fulfill its function effectively. “A great UI ensures that users spend more time on your website which further increases their probability of making transactions” says Sundeep Malhotra, CEO, HomeShop18.com.

A website is bombarding information. Be it the colors, shapes or simply words. Each of these is evoking a certain response in the user’s brain which is then evoking emotions in a user. Interestingly it is the emotion that is leading to making a decision. “It is the emotion that comes to the rescue when we are overwhelmed with the choices and can’t decide on one. Design evokes emotions like no other and when it does bring out the desired emotion in people, the decision to acquire happens” says Sudhindra V.
<strong>The Investment in Design</strong>
While there are really no statistics to really point to the investment in design but time and manpower as a resource are dedicated to this in plenty. “Be it Facebook, Google, Amazon or Twitter – they all test their user interfaces with precision with a small set of users to ensure they are aligned with the larger set of millions who eventually use them everyday” says Sudhindra V who recently was the star speaker in recently concluded IEX event. The high point being the Lifebuoy website, the focus of design being on “celebration” of a child’s 5th birthday as unhygienic habits takes their toll on children in rural India not even able to reach their 5th birthday.

Recently Google tested 41 shades of blue for their top navigation links.
Ebay changed their logo and they spent 3 years testing it before making it completely official. “EBay does indepth research on the effect of colors, text and whitespace on users. We revamped our checkout page after user testing it over 9 months” says Deepa Thomas, Ecommerce Evangelist, Ebay India.

Ebay globally changed their traditional homepage to Ebay Feed based on set interests of users. So out of 2 million products they pull out on products relevant to the user. Homeshop18.com recently revamped their design. Says Sundeep Malthora of Homeshop18 “With the new website design we have not only seen a jump in the footfall but the conversion rate has also improved. ”
Taking the Eyeball Model Hybrid
While for Ecommerce websites design change and change in sales is easily measurable what about content based websites?

For content based websites, the problem is after spending so much effort on usability, websites have to monetize by showing ads and so advertising has be in context of the website usability guidelines. Now is the big question which advertising network is really doing that especially in context of design integrity?

A new startup www.picadly.com is adding revenue to content based websites by showing ad panels that only appear when a user shows some interest like a mouseover on an image or a click on the image. In simple words it allows a website to preserve its design integrity while at the same time maximizing revenues. “For a fashion, interior or any blog with photos, the central thing is beauty and design and user experience. Picadly is the the 1st company in India to deliver ads and Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on photos in a permission based way hence increasing user experience and also maintaining design integrity ” says Nitin Kumarr, Founder, Picadily.com
The Future of Web Design
In human psychology a simple thought leads to emotion and which in turn into action. So no matter what the action is, its seed is in thought. Yet the complexity is association. So in psychological terms while you may know exercise is good for you, how do you create this new association so that the motivation for exercises comes easily and naturally. New associations come from desire or motivation, which means you either reject or accept it. So in psychological terms a strong desire combining with great association and you have the person literally on treadmill everyday. How does that translate into web design? Whatever it maybe, for sure the future web designers will have to create interface of Compelling Experience Led designs that evoke powerful motivating emotions.

The choice is immense for the consumer especially in coming years. The best so far in terms of action is One Click, by itunes, amazon.com and others. Which maybe the best one can reach. Yet behind this One Click is where the action really lies in future i.e. creation of that compelling behaviour in a user to make that one click of purchase or action.

This year’s Future of Web Design has some really interesting speakers. There is Allen Tan from NyTimes, there is Dane Howard from ebay besides other interesting names who discuss the future of web design. So what could be the future of web design? That’s an interesting question which time will answer.
Puneet Mehrotra is a business and technology columnist for HindustanTimes.com