As Entrepreneur points out, many companies enjoy experimenting with web designs for the purpose of decreasing bounce rates and keeping readership engaged. Adapting to newer, more user-friendly online web designs is continually a part of this process.
Many website design and development companies have, as of late, been experimenting with horizontal layouts as opposed to more traditional, vertical layouts. Horizontal layouts are seen as being more modern and intuitive, as opposed to vertical layouts that take their cue from older design needs (a physical newspaper).
However, recent studies by Liraz Margalit, a psychologist working for ClickTale, indicate that companies may want to pause before choosing to switch over to this new format. By studying how consumers interacted with both layouts, she found that visitors were actually less engaged with the horizontal layout.
Heatmaps indicated that users scrolled further, hovered, and interacted more with the original vertical layout. Why was this happening? The findings illustrate why website design agencies need to keep the psychology of consumer behavior in mind, and never prize appearance over usability.
Antici…pation
For the vertical layout format, without scrolling down, users can see that there is more content they can explore. In other words, they can only see the top paragraph or so of each article. By contrast, the new horizontal layout has no easy way of indicating that there is more to explore — the first article displays entirely within the line of view. In other words, vertical layouts encourage scrolling.
Object Recognition
Our brains recognize patterns based on what we have successfully observed in the past. Show someone the Kanisza triangle and users will see overlapping triangles, even though the shapes are only implied. The shape matches, though, what viewers have previously experienced to be a triangle. This is why horizontal layouts often fall flat. They remind users of previous encountered designs, and a horizontal, closed format is a pattern reminiscent of page bottoms — which is a psychological signal to stop reading.
Online web design courses have to take more complex concepts like the psychology of the viewing experience into account. It’s for this reason that website design pricing can’t simply be seen as choosing the lowest cost — instead, you want the design that will deliver the most impact.
Is your website optimized so that it is not only sleek, but encourages users to stick around? Let us know in the comments.
