What are the secrets of creating award-winning design?

When it comes to conversions, the design of your website plays a far more crucial role than you think. You can utilize any strategy in the world to boost conversions, but if your website design looks like crap, all your efforts will go wasted.

Design is not just art. It is also marketing. Here are the secrets of creating an award-winning website design.

Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is the order in which the eye perceives what it sees and is very important for creating a great web design.

Some parts of your website – calls to actions, forms, etc – hold more importance than others and you want these parts to get more attention than less important ones.

Are all the 10 items in your website menu equally important? Where do you want your site visitors to click? Put the important links under spotlight.

Your business objective decides how the elements will rank on your website. Without a specific goal, it’s hard to know what to prioritize.

Hick’s Law

Hick’s law says that as the choices increase, so does the time it takes to make a decision.

The more choices you give to your website user, the more difficult it will be to choose one, or worse choose anything at all. So in order to deliver a more enjoyable user experience, we need to first remove choices.

To create an award-winning web design, the process of removing distracting options has to remain consistent throughout the entire design process.

In the era of countless choices, consumers need better filters. If you sell a wide variety of products, add better filters to allow easier decision making.

Fitt’s Law

Fitt’s law says that the time required to reach a target area (for instance, call to action) depends on the distance to the target and the size of the target.

Meaning, it is easy to reach an object which is bigger and closer to us.

But it doesn’t mean that a button should be designed so big that it takes half the screen. It will become much easier to click a tiny button when it is given a 20% size increase.

The size of a button should depend on its expected use. You can analyze your stats to find out the buttons people use the most, and make such buttons bigger (easier to click).

For instance, there’s a form on your website you want visitors to fill. At the bottom of the form, there are two buttons: “Submit” and “Reset.” Most users will hit ‘submit’. Hence, this button should be kept bigger than ‘reset’.

White Space & Neat design

White space is the portion of a web page left “blank”. It’s the space between graphics, visuals or margins.

This “empty” space is an important element of website design. It allows the elements in it to exist at all. White space defines the implementation of hierarchy. The hierarchy of color, images and information.

A web page without white space, stuffed with graphics or text, is at the risk of appearing cluttered, and is typically hard to read.

Adequate white space makes a website look ‘neat’. While simple and neat design is important for sending across a clear message, it doesn’t mean fewer content.

A neat website design makes the best use of the white space in it.

Conclusion

It is important to design a website for the user and have clear business objective in mind. Using these web design secrets you can achieve award-winning results.