How a Well-Designed Website Builds Trust with Your Customers

When it comes to eCommerce, design can immediately impact the way users perceive your brand.

Humans are visual creatures. What pleases the eye has a greater chance of pleasing the mind.

When it comes to eCommerce, design can immediately impact the way users perceive a brand. It’s that all-important first impression; design can influence the credibility or value we attach to a brand or company.

According to Sweor, 38% of people will leave a website if they deem the layout unattractive. Furthermore, 57% of online visitors won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile.

As illustrated by these statistics, design can make or break your eCommerce website. Bad design can leave an online visitor confused or misled. In contrast, good design can build trust with your customers and community, fostering a strong relationship that eventually leads to conversions and even brand loyalty. A good relationship cannot exist without the foundation of trust.

Today, I'll be outlining a few ways you can utilize best practices in design to foster trust with your online users.

Consistency

Brands that deliver consistent designs are typically successful because they have created an aesthetic that communicates who they are while also reflecting who their community is. When done effectively, good branding invites others to join in and become a part of this community because the branding has done the work to spark that immediate connection.

When you see a brand that connects with your interests and personality, you feel a sense of meaning. Recognition almost. This feeling makes you feel more connected to a brand off the bat.

While it’s important to make this initial connection, it’s even more important to maintain it.

If you make a friend who suddenly starts acting weird out of the blue, it will likely throw you off. This same logic applies to brand design. If a customer understands you to have a specific design language and aesthetic, they’ll want to see that representation across multiple pages and platforms, without deviation.

Building trust means that you need to show your customers that they can know what to expect from you and therefore rely on you.

Your customers interact with design; it’s the veneer of your company. When this experience is consistent and predictable (and pleasing) it becomes trustworthy. Delivering that same high-quality experience that they love and desire builds the foundation for both brand loyalty and advocacy.

Design Intentionally – For Every Device

Having a beautiful website is important. But it’s also important to have a website experience that optimizes for the device that your customers are viewing.

Through buttons, drop-downs, breadcrumbs, hover states, search bars, and more, you can craft a pleasurable shopping experience that users will want to revisit again and again.

If you can’t find an important CTA button (such as “add to cart”) because the colour blends in a little too strongly with the rest of the design, you make it that much more difficult for users to navigate your site. It complicates their experience and leaves them confused.

Understand what’s important and what’s not; use design to spotlight the key features your users should be able to easily access.

Think of your design as a system, creating structure, meaning, and consistency.

Tell Your Brand’s Story

Design is a beautiful thing. With colour, typography, photography, clever layout, and more, we can create a visual language that communicates the overarching theme of a brand. We can communicate their values, their practices, and what they stand for. The possibilities are endless.

Building trust with users entails showing them the full scope of your brand and all that you have to offer.

Design is your opportunity to think about the story behind your brand and incorporate that messaging into the design of your eCommerce store.

What makes your brand unique? Furthermore, what are the unique personality/value pairings that separate you from other brands in your industry?

With design, you can play to the nuances of your brand with delicacy. Or you can scream them loud and clear if that’s the personality of your brand. The interface of your website is your playground – have fun and stay true to who your brand is. In doing so, you can create a design language that speaks to your brand authentically, and builds trust with your users.

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