Why Design Affects Your Bottom Line

In the numbers-driven world of business, it’s easy to undervalue design.

To someone who’s responsible for closing sales and meeting growth projections, design probably seems like a superfluous luxury. It’s the pretty wrappings. It’s the fancy bells and whistles. It’s the little niceties. But it’s not going to make or break the success of your business.

Or is it?

Humans are visual creatures. As such, design is one of the first and most important ways that a potential customer experiences your brand. From your website to the package on the store shelf to your products themselves, design plays a role in every decision that customer makes – from whether your company is trustworthy to whether they need and want what you have to offer to whether or not they are going to shell out their hard-earned dollars to buy it.

What you’re left with, then, is an indisputable fact: design has a direct effect on your bottom line.

Building trust

Imagine this scene: You go into a doctor’s office, and there are nothing but sick patients in the waiting room. The tile on the floor is cracked and dirty, and the chairs and side tables are tattered and torn. There’s an unidentifiable but unpleasant smell lingering in the air. The receptionist has a bit of an attitude. When she finally calls you back to meet the doctor, he’s wearing a stained lab coat, and his hair is disheveled. Do you really trust him with your health?

Does that scenario sound extreme? It’s no more drastic than the visceral negative reaction you create in a prospective customer when your website, packaging, brochures and business cards are poorly designed and show a lack of attention to detail.

Just as the doctor in our hypothetical situation may be a brilliant medical professional, it’s hard to see past the poor image conveyed by his office, his staff and even his own physical appearance to trust in his expertise.

Similarly, you may have a great product, but new customers aren’t going to be open to trying it because it doesn’t look like it’s worth their money. There’s too great a disconnect between the quality you claim and the quality of the tangible items they can see right in front of their very eyes.

To put it plainly, if you do not value your image, customers will not, either.

Creating desire

Today’s world is one of choice and variety. Anytime there’s a purchase decision to be made, the options are nearly limitless.

For example, let’s say you’re planning to buy a new laptop, and you’re trying to decide between a Mac, Sony Vaio, Acer and Toshiba. They’re all well-known brands, and if you get down to the nuts and bolts of their features and benefits, they’re fairly indistinguishable from one another. Even the differences in price aren’t enough to sway you.

So how do you decide which one to buy? You go with your gut feeling.

That gut feeling is nothing more than a reaction that’s governed by emotion rather than logic. Design plays a key role in driving that emotional connection between human beings and inanimate objects like laptops. It’s what makes us attach ourselves to certain brands because we like what owning or using them says about us.

Maybe you liked the feel of the Sony in your hands, or perhaps you liked the external casing on the Acer. Maybe you just like the image of yourself sitting at a Starbucks with that universally recognizable Apple logo on your laptop. No matter what strikes your fancy, it all goes back to design.

A good designer can pinpoint what it is that evokes a certain emotional reaction from an individual and translate that into visual images that help to forge a connection.

You have to ask yourself what’s sexy about your product and how to convey that in a way that creates desire. Perhaps you want your customers to feel a sense of freedom when they use your product. Or maybe you want your product to be associated with elite professionals. It’s all possible through well planned and executed design.

As hard as they may be to define, emotions and gut feelings drive buying decisions, and good design can sway those decisions in your favor.

Influence and motivate action

Really good design puts your customers in the palm of your hand. It analyzes problems and creates solutions that can influence the actions of your audience.

How? By steering and directing their actions in ways that work at an almost sub-conscious level.

Principles of design like visual hierarchy and balance ensure that people see exactly what you want them to see.

Think about how you process a typical web page as a user. Your eye is drawn to certain images and colors on the page. It follows visual cues from one element to the next. It skims big, bold headings to glean what the page is about.

When you’re on the other side of the screen, you need to make sure that all of these elements are working in your favor to put you in control and in a position to achieve the outcome that is most beneficial to your business and your growth objectives. Good design will make it happen.

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On the Right Path

When I was in college, I had a professor who spoke a lot about the importance of wayfinding. He was especially interested in how the Department of Transportation studied design elements such as typography and contrast to discover the best font and colors to use on their signs. When you drive down the interstate, those big green signs with white lettering make navigation pretty easy. Or consider the wayfinding system of a large airport. Getting from terminal A to terminal D would be a nightmare without all the signs helping us along the way. The core function of good wayfinding is to get a person from point A to point B, quickly and efficiently. In order to do that, a person navigating the system should need only to look for signs to point them in the right direction. Just as an exit sign tells an interstate driver where to get off, the visual cues on a well designed homepage should direct a visitor onto the right path.

Why It’s Important to Funnel Visitors

It is the job of the homepage to quickly funnel users to the information they need the most.We often hear the term “funneling traffic.” It is usually used in the context of getting people to visit a site from the outside via search engines, social media or a traditional marketing campaign. But it is equally important to funnel traffic once they get to your site. Your company may have several types of audiences, and you need to speak to each one in different ways. The type of information provided and the tone in which it is presented will be different depending on the audience. A site that tailors its information to specific audiences needs a way for those audiences to quickly identify which category they fit in or which area they are most interested in. It is, therefore, the job of the homepage to do that efficiently. Success in this area means getting a visitor off the homepage and deeper into the site—where you can convert them from a visitor to a customer or fan. It also means protecting them from purposeless information that gets in the way of what they’re really looking for.

Know Your Audience

Before you start funneling visitors you need to identify your audiences. By knowing your target audience, you will be more confident in knowing how to connect with them. Again, your site may have several target audiences. A healthcare site has to accommodate both patients as well as medical professionals. A nonprofit organization has to accommodate people who want to volunteer their time, those who want to donate money, and those who need to use the service the organization provides. All of these audiences have unique needs and specific requests—but before they can become more than a visitor, your site has to give them what they're looking for. The power of your site relies on your ability to focus on your audiences.

Focus Your Funneling

We’ve all been there: stopped at an intersection, not knowing which way to go. One road with two names. Two roads with one name, but going in different directions. Sometimes you just pick a road and see what happens. And sometimes you get lost and have to turn around—something you certainly don’t want a visitor to your site doing. It's natural for a business to want to accommodate every single visitor that comes to their site. Doing this, however, can quickly lead to a cluttered homepage and information overload. Or, in our transportation analogy, an intersection just like this: If your homepage looked like this, most visitors would simply hit the back button and leave your site, not only confused and turned off, but more important, with a negative opinion of your company as a whole. If your site has many types of people visiting, it is important to identify the characteristics of your core audiences in order to quickly direct your most important traffic to where they need to go. This will keep your homepage clean, simplified and actually make decision making easier for the user. Visitors given 3 choices based on core audience characteristics—as opposed to 10 choices based on characteristics for every visitor—will be able to identify their needs and navigate more quickly. Your homepage does not need to encompass every detail about your company or product. Statistically, only 30% of a visitors time is spent on the homepage. The rest is spent on deeper level pages that are better equipped to handle the needs and interests of your visitors—and move them to action.

Give Them What They Like

Once core audiences have been established, you need to determine how you want to motivate them and what actions you want them to take. It is not as simple as saying, “visitor x goes here and visitor y goes here.” You need to know what those visitors are interested in—what motivates them to delve further and eventually cause them to take action or reach a conversion point. Audiences may be influenced by statistics, testimonials, free trials or product features. By knowing what motivates your audience, you will know how to quickly grab their attention and get them to want to take action. So what kind of action do you want your visitors to take? Of course the ultimate action is often financial, whether that is buying a product or service or donating money. But there are other actions that can facilitate that final goal. You may want first-time visitors to download a demo, take a tour or request more information by filling out a form or signing up for a newsletter. Or perhaps you want to drive people to a physical store using a “find the nearest location” feature.

Bringing It All Together

Now that you know the who, how and why, it’s time to bring everything together in a killer homepage design that will not only look great, but function seamlessly as a visitor’s guide to your site. Many well-designed sites begin with a large introductory headline and a brief opening paragraph that gives the visitor a snapshot of what the company is about or what it is selling. The funneling occurs with individual modules that target a specific audience. Designs should be clean and contain good contrast to quickly identify elements. Headlines should be specific, leaving little doubt who the following information is intended for. Typically, “more” or “continue” buttons are used, prompting the visitor to explore the next level of the site. Often pictures of a product or other graphical elements are used to entice the visitor into wanting more. Here are examples of sites that do this well.

Conclusion

Your homepage is not only a first impression, but the starting point to an experience. A good homepage is a spring board that motivates people to explore more important areas of your site. It clearly direct visitors to the information they need the most to get them to a final destination. And if their journey is a pleasant one, you're one step closer to a repeat visitor, fan, and even customer. Happy trails!

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