S1 Ep6 Why good design drives conversion

People trust the site that feels easy, not the site with more detail. That's not taste, that's your brain managing risk. When something feels hard to process, it feels less safe than people leave. Welcome to ThinkShift, the podcast where neuroscience meets business. Today you're unpacking why a great design drives conversion, what your brain is really reacting to and what changes this week to make decisions feel easier. If your website is not converting, this matters. Alright Leanne, good to see you again. Hey Clint, how are you going? I am good. How's your week been? It's been a solid. Yes. That exciting. I always say productive. Yeah, because everyone goes on busy on busy. Don't say busy. I say everyone's busy. Yeah, it's all hard to be busy if you're being productive. That's right. It's not easy. It's not productive. Which happens? That's right. We're going to talk about why a good design drives conversion. First, we're going to go through the science behind it. People don't trust what feels hard. They trust what feels easy. What is cognitive fluency in plain language? Cognitive fluency is an interesting term, but it's around how easily the brain processes something. So whether it's something that we're reading, an image that we're looking at or a combination, it's how our brain is operating. It's causing us a bit of grief. Is it hard? Does it feel like there's a lot of effort or does it come naturally to us and it's pretty much an easy step or an easy guideline or an easy decision to make? Okay. So why does more detail sometimes reduce conversion then? So when something's harder to do, it feels it's more complicated. So there's risk. It's, "Oh, I don't know if I should do it. This is too many steps." Also, there's an element of expectation from all of us. Whether we're on a business side of things or whether we're consumer side of things, there's little expectation. And if it's a lot more than what we've expected, we think, "Oh, I don't know about this." It's high risk. They want too much from me. I haven't got time. It's hard. Might not be hard, but it is. So that can create big problems. It sounds too hard. It does. It does. And often one of the biggest mistakes we make as humans, the human species because other animals do not, is we think the more that we offer and the more complicated it looks, the better we are, the more important we feel, the more intelligent we look, the more the better the surface or the higher the status of the product actually works, the total opposite. Absolutely. And I think a really good example of this is when we all know very well and that would be Microsoft and Apple. So if you look at Microsoft packaging of the past, probably early 2000s and onwards, everything was on the boxes of the Microsoft Windows and whatnot. So marketing messaging and even on their marketing displays and advertising that would appear on billboards or whatnot, so much information. Yeah. And you look at Apple and what they do, it's just like one headline product picture and it's like, okay, what's more powerful? What's more impactful? And you're just explaining now why that is so minimalistic, sleek, clean, know what you're talking about. I mean, there is and some of you listening and watching this, you know, please send us a message on our socials, where everywhere. Who of you keep your Apple packaging? I actually did a post on this a little while ago around. I'm guilty. Oh, wow. There you go, Clint. Okay. So here's, here's, Joyn's Clint in keeping some, maybe not all, but some of your, because of the crispness and the, the eliteness that the product actually, the way it feels and the perception, oh, I mean, the great product, right? But it's not about that. How we feel unboxing an Apple product is a process. It is, but it's a simple process. It's simple. And it makes the consumer feel special, not the product feel special. That's right. Yeah. So what role does visual hierarchy play in decision making? God. It's everything. It's the way we look at and how we interpret any information that we see, especially when it comes to websites, right? So what we see first has most importance, whether we're looking from left to right, which is generally how the brain operates in most societies. Obviously there's other cultural differences and different ways that people read from right to left, depending on where you're from, but the majority of English speaking world, even if, even if English is not your first language, generally we operate from left to right. That's why I always say logos should be on the top left, any important information, top left, because it's what the brain interprets first from a visual hierarchy perspective. Also, how much information there is. So if there's too much information to be able to place in a hierarchy, it all becomes one big mess. We need to compartmentalize our brain, create buckets of information, and we need to provide a way to let our consumers do that, not by making it messy and busy. So often, Clint, you talk about having minimal and a lot of space around which I know we're going to talk about later around the way that someone would read a website and how important that is to reduce cognitive load and cognitive fluency. Yeah, cognitive load is a huge one. It's a fine balance between giving enough information so the user knows why they are there and the value of your product and service, and then overloading them to the point where they turn them away. That's why I think because of that fine line, it's so important to hire people. hire copywriters and strategists and user experience experts to do that heavy lifting for you, because they're the ones that know what that balance is. It's high risk for a business to go and try and do it themselves. And I say a lot of this with particularly web development business businesses. You don't have to pay a fortune. You don't. I don't want people thinking, "Oh, yeah, but this so well." No, you can get great copywriters and strategists that have to pay a fortune. That will work with you and understand decision sciences. You'll pay for it later. If you don't pay for it upfront, the cost will be later on. The last thing you want to do is spend $1,000 on a new website development and go, "Oh, no, I'll do the content. I'll do the copy." I know what I want to say. It's like, "You might, but is it in a way that is optimal for your user? Is it optimal for the personas that you've identified that are going to be using your website that they need to convert in a certain way? Do you understand that path to purchase behavior? Do you understand?" Usually not. Yeah. Like so. For which you don't risk it. All right. So what I do, people confuse pretty with trust, trust, but. Yeah. Tristan, cut that out. Don't leave that issue. Oh, gosh. Why did people confuse pretty with trust worthy? Oh, wow. So people think when something looks nice or aesthetically pleasing, that it's trusting. But it actually. It is. And a lot of it can potentially be a lie on misleading. Yeah. So we want something to look nice. Absolutely. When you are designing and you're putting together, say, your website or your marketing collateral or any assets for your business that needs to be on-brand, it needs to represent you, your corporate identity, your expertise, absolutely, but. But. And this is someone who loves aesthetics right now, love fashion and colors and patterns and textures. We can go overboard. And we need to pull that back because that doesn't necessarily mean that a website's trustworthy. If it's cluttered, if there's a lot of information that we need to take in and translate, actually increases risk. Right. Not trust. Okay. So, reliability. Is that because there's an inconsistency between the message and the visual? That too, absolutely. Right. And he's an example. There was a small study that they did in Oxford University. There was an Oxford University professor and they asked him to write two and published two articles. One written in his discipline and as a professor using, you know, professorial language and one that could be read and understood by a 12-year-old. These two were then sent to the faculty and to the students and they were asked, "Who do you think was a subject matter expert out of these two?" And the majority of the people said the article that was written for a 12-year-old. Minimalistic, straight to the point, they could understand it. In fact, not only did they say it was written better, they put more trust in that because they thought, because the other one was so chock full of language and jargon and information they didn't understand, they actually thought the person was trying to pretend to know what they were talking about rather than actually knowing it. And then obviously in the end, they found out it was one professor that did it. It's such an interesting study and I actually have told a lot of people about this. Like, minimal doesn't mean bland and doesn't mean dumb. A lot of people say to me, "But I'm really intelligent. Yes, you are. Let's show that." Yeah. I think as well, like, that comes down to identifying persona. So meeting the market where they are at. That's right. Talking to them in language that they understand, and this is why the persona work upfront, and for those that don't understand what that is, it's identifying the users that are using your service or product on your website, and talking to them in the language that they understand. Without that work upfront, catastrophic. You will fall into these traps of over-explaining, overemphasizing unimportant information or using acronyms that these users won't understand, all sorts of pitfalls. A lot of the work that I do is in profiling and using profiling attributes to help clients with their personas. Neurodesign is a proprietary version of disk, which I credited in. We use it in a very different way. I teach it in a very different way around understanding those that understand that the dysformula, we use it in a way that is appropriate for design for sales and marketing and conversion. It still comes under the dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance, but we have designed this profiling in a way that is more around language, around text, certain medium within the way that you're communicating, length, emails, call to action buttons, that change purpose or profile. That's really important because for some, they want detail for others, give me a one-liner and I'm done. You need to identify that and that's one of the biggest mistakes that businesses that I see. You see where they almost sabotage their own business by not actually doing this exercise and understanding. There's a really good example that you and I worked on recently with a real estate business and they were talking to their potential customers with the same language, the same proposals, regardless of who it was, what their profile was or whatnot. One of the work we did with them was all around, okay, we now need to change our proposals to each one of those disc profiles, D-I-S-C. You're not going to get it right across the board every time, but at least if you can identify the core ones because not everyone's one, right? They're offering a D-I or a DS or whatever it might be. If you can then talk to those users in the way that they want to be spoken to, against a bit like persona mapping, it comes under that. The effectiveness of those proposals goes through the roof because you are now talking to them. I think a really good example actually was an email. You never talked to a D on email, ask them how their weekend was. So just lose them. Speak to the point. Delete. Delete. Which I think is incredible. Most people would think that because of course you feel like I need to be polite, I need to ask them how their weekend. Everybody needs to be. Emailing to confirm that our appointment is blah, blah, blah and leave it at that point. Leave it at that point. Which is what I am. You ask me how my weekend is. We'll expect me to tell you. So that's, yeah, it is. And again, it's not about you, it's about your customer. Yes. Design is in decoration. It is decision engineering. So let's talk about what to look out for as a consumer. If a site feels hard, your brain assumes the business is hard. So let's talk about the fastest signs. A site is not designed for decision. Yes. And this is your expertise. It is. And maybe you can go through some of these particular things, especially in your experience of what you've seen. Also, then what you've had to fix and redesign or design from the outset as well. Yeah. So too many competing elements. This is probably the number one thing. Trying to fit too much in blocks on each screen. No clear next step. So the user is unclear what they need to do next. Inconsistent fonts and spacing. So utilizing all different typefaces more than two, three, four walls of text, right, way over copy written way too much information. And also say not using chunking. So chunking is putting information and imagery into blocks that can be easily digested by the consumer. So they get what they need in bite size pieces rather than walls of text all in one in one go. They're the main things. Yeah. So the legacy is, and I, again, we're coming back to, you know, we think more is better, but more provides more opportunity for risk. Yes. Now, I'm not saying that you just want one sentence on a page. I mean, we need to be sensible here, but we've got to learn and re-learn and condition ourselves that more is not better. I mean, when people say, you know, less is best, that's a cliche for a reason in a number of situations and circumstances. You want to be concise also having a website that is clearer and minimalistic and, you know, without those, you know, things that you were talking about. It shows your expertise. It shows it clearer. You concentrate on what's important rather than the fluff. Yes. Because if we can't interpret or read something quickly, as far as we're concerned, it's fluff. Yes. And that's what happened with the paper from the professor. It was very concise. They understood it. They go, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yep, this is a great paper. The other one was fluff, but in fact, the other one was very serious and actually a lot more detailed and had a lot more expertise. But to the consumer, no, it's just fluff. And I know a number, but I see websites on a daily basis where I look at them and go, oh, my gosh, I can feel a headache coming on. Yes. And there's a number that I'm thinking of right now in my head. Some that you probably know exactly what I'm thinking. It's like, just you need to wind it back. What is it? Still distilled distilled distilled. Don't hide your expertise in your authority. It should be standing out, don't hide it amongst the mountains and the walls of text and imagery and colors and all these fonts and sizes. Be consistent. Make it easier for someone's brain to be able to interpret. So then when they're reading your expertise, it's clear and it's direct. And also the slopingness that you've just referred to around, you know, font sizes and even, you know, alignment of elements outside of a grid, which is a, you know, a 12, 16 column, a grid on a page that is used for designing, aligning elements as a designer. If those elements aren't lining up structurally, it becomes sloppy and that signals risk, right? Suddenly you're going, these guys aren't an authority. They don't know what they're talking about. Yeah, they can't even line up the text. Yeah, I don't know what it is. See, that's sometimes it's subliminal, right? It's like, I don't, I know there's something not quite right yet. And suddenly I feel like they're not worth me investing in or converting with or whatever it might be. Yeah. So a bit of a mini checklist for the listeners. Can you tell what to do in three seconds when someone arrives at your website? Is it immediately obvious? And a client of mine in recent years is though in the lending business and their headline says, we do lending. That's literally the headline. It's like, oh, that's what they do. It needs to be really obvious. Yeah. Don't get caught up in this long spiel and particularly on first impression of the page, trying to say too much to everybody. What was the statistic that we were talking about yesterday? 50 milliseconds. And we can reference these papers for you too if you want them as well and send us a message. But 50 milliseconds is the first impression. So we obviously look at takes three seconds to fully consume that information. And again, it's only three seconds, but 50 milliseconds is what it takes to decide to pursue into that three second interaction or not. Yeah. No. So what was it? We do lending. We do. We do. Actually, I understand. Yeah. I understand. Can you go into the detail right? Yeah. Yeah. Can you find price proof and next steps without hunting? You know, we talked about dark patterns in the previous episodes. A little bit of that in some ways. Yes. You know, make it easy for the user to find what they need. Does the page feel consistent from top to bottom? Do forms feel easy? Not demanding? You know, you're making it just simple to converse. Yeah, I don't want to add my address. I don't want to add my favorite color. No. I don't want to add my name. I'm not as made in name. I don't want to add the name of my pet. Yeah. Do you need to put in too much effort to find the information you need to drive a conversion? So they're the main things. All right. So now we're going to talk about the practical design levers that drive conversion. So design drives conversion through a few repeatable levers. Number one is visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy is one primary message and one primary action per screen. So meaning your eyes land on the key message first. What not to do, right? Everything looks equally important. That is a big no-no. So we need to have, and there's language around this that some of our list is named. It may not be familiar with H1, H2, H3, H4. So these are web development terms. Your heading or headline will be H1. And then the next headline or subheading down will be H2. And the subheading underneath that one will be H3 and so on and so forth. And there's certain font sizes for each of you, right? They're all different font sizes to make sure that prominence is determined by size of the typeface. It's very easy for the user to cognitively understand that. So yeah, that one is-- So this one is important. This one is not as important. And then they go on the next page, go, OK, this is something they're going to take note of. But then I've gone back to H1. Whoa, I better take notice. Makes it very easy to understand flow as well when it's set out in such a way with the H1 to H6 kind of hierarchy. The next one is level two is typography and readability. Fast reading, clear structure, short lines. you can skim and still understand what's on the page right? So what not to to do, dense copy and weak headings, like making sure your fonts are consistent. No more than two, heading style and a body, copy style, different. I think I have that. You do. You built your own, and my website, so yeah, I hope so. I can do the expert. It just makes it. You don't want to be vanilla, either. You don't, you want to stand out a bit. You need to have a personality. And I know there's a lot of typepaces out there that we all lean on as designers and we kind of get stuck in the enters and the monsoirats. Some had a Google compatible and some of them aren't. Yes, well, I learned. It is. So there's a bit of a mind filled around type choice and treatment, but we can often get caught up in feeling safe by using ones we're familiar with that we know work on mobile tablet desktop. But what's happened is that the reliance on those is meaning suddenly everyone's website looks like that. So everybody's using inter suddenly in 2025 last year. Inter was a typeface that everybody uses. And so suddenly all the websites start looking the same. You've got headlines that look the same. You've got body copy looks the same. So fantastic typeface don't get me wrong. But suddenly there's no differentiation between different products and services. So I would say, you know, importantly, use something with a bit of personality, but hire someone that knows how to help you with that. You know, it's not easy for a business to determine what that is. And it all comes back to the brand as well. So, you know, it's a branding exercise has been done at the beginning of a business creation. Then we use those guidelines and whatnot to determine what those typepaces are. Next one is new. It's not so early interrupt. If you think of new design, you know, we have that, you know, the I love the actual like H1 and your design. The headline typeface. Just and then we've got a more, you know, simplicity. Yeah. Yeah. One for a reason. And plus we're a science based organization. So it has to then, you know, compliment what we do. But if you go on to a neuro design, not consulting and have a look, you can see the difference what Clint's talking about and yeah, how that fits in. And there's two. Yeah. There's not 10. That's right. And how it affects, that's right. How it affects brand perception. Right. There's a premium feel depending on the typefaces you choose. Right. And and their size and their space and the, the individual hierarchy. It's so important to get that right. Yeah. For brand perception. You could mean the difference between, you know, a sale and not. Yeah. Yeah. Before we continue, don't forget to like and subscribe to think shift. So you don't miss out on any of the upcoming episodes. The last lever here is spacing layout clarity. We've kind of touched on this a little bit. So it's grouping separation predictable rhythm. So sections feel distinct and calm. You know, it's not this chaos and, you know, different sizing and widths of sections. And it can become really heavy cognitively again to absorb the information. And so we want to avoid that if we can. What not to do crowded layout think it's a spacing. So yeah, again, we've talked about that. Yeah. And, you know, the way that we're behaving and operating around scrolling is changing too. I mean, you'd be familiar on some of the listes would be and would be familiar and subscribe to be familiar around the F shape. You know, you go from left to right all the way across and then you've got the smaller one and then, you know, you're going, you know, vertically to horizontal, horizontal vertical. And that is changing. Yeah. Because of our system one thinking from the dual process theory. So our system one, our quick thinking is that we're not even giving ourselves time to look in the shape of an F. It's now a blob down the middle of the page. That's right. Top down. So when you were talking about skimming and still being able to understand and interpret and get an idea of what the website's about or what you're about. That's really important. So we're now straight down the middle. And yeah, I did a post on this actually with taken from a study with the two pictures from, you know, heat map and a heat map application, which was placed on these in the study that was placed on to look at where people were going or what was driving them. And from eyesight and also, you know, mouth clicks and it was incredible to see the difference from previous 12 months ago to now. Yeah, right. Yeah. Attention span. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So there's an expectation now that we are working at the speed of speed of light. It's not even that we're just doing it. There's an expectation that we should be faster. We can be faster. How do we get faster? And is it a good thing? No, but it's not bad either. It's the way that we're operating. AI has contributed to some of that as well. But we need to go with the expectation of the consumer as consumer. And if that's what they're doing, that's what we need to provide. Correct. Let's move on to business. So as a business, what to change this week? So you don't need to redesign your entire website to improve conversion. You just need clarity and an effort reduction. So what are the most common conversion-killing design mistakes that you see, Leanne? These a couple of the one main ones is, and this does my hidden actually, multiple call to actions in particular, but then multiple call to actions that are competing. Yes. So different verbiage or different style or different different. Yes. So the text is different, the color of the buttons different, the rounded edges versus sharp edges, which is obviously that inconsistency in behaviour, says something different. So we could even say learn more, learn more, learn more, but you've got to be all different colors. All you've got, download this, subscribe, learn more, make a call, book a call. Oh my goodness. So it's competing as well as too many. And for over like, what do you actually want me to do? Yeah, too much choice. Too much choice. And we talk about choice paradox when there's too much choice. We walk away. That's it. We think it's more choice the better, actually. No, you tell me what you want me to do. Do you want me to book a call? Do you want me to book a meeting, discovery call or book a meeting? Or do you want me to learn more? Yes. Drive the user towards the path that makes the most sense for them. For them. For them. Absolutely. Another one, Uncley Headings, what is it that you do? I mean, so many times I'll read a website or someone will say, I actually went to this website and I still don't know what they're doing. You would see this art. I mean, this is your, your ex-field of expertise. But even for me and, and, you know, I know a lot about it, but not to your level. No, we're near. It's, I've just looked at this website. I actually know the person. And I sort of know what you do because I know the person. I'm looking at the website going, I have nobody. Yeah. It looks nice. Okay. So what? It's going to be clear. I don't actually don't know. Yeah. Yeah. The other one would be weak proof placement. So proof meaning social proof. So testimonials, brands or businesses that the business works with. So it has appeared on the day show has appeared on NBC has appeared on here. Or other companies that we work with. And obviously, yeah, the testimonial piece. Yeah. By week, we mean nowhere near court of action. Yeah. Or too far down the bottom of the page. That's just I was not even on the homepage. Yeah. Just hidden. Like, yeah. I mean, if you've got some great reviews, testimonials or your awards that you've won or affiliations, you know, showcase those. You should be proud. You've earned those. Yes. Don't wait until it's further back because it's a huge risk that you won't even get anyone there. Yeah. The big Boo Boo, which probably isn't seen as a Boo Boo is, you know, form over function. We often and I know this because I'm a designer as well. And I see a lot in the design game where we concentrate so heavily on winning design awards for how aesthetic our websites are. But they actually don't convert quite as well as ones that aren't over designed. So there's a fine balance between being too designed and just offering what the user needs, what they need to get to a conversion. Yes, it needs to still obviously look amazing, have clear structure, hierarchy, font choice, all the rest of it. But it's when we we overdo the form bit and it costs us in terms of conversion. We need to be really careful on that. Okay. So there's some measurement focus we can do on on our websites. And that is track clicks on the primary CD. Anyone can do this right? Anyone can do this. Track form completion rate. Like you'll need analytics or some kind of tracking software set up on your website to be able to do this. Track drop off points on key pages. So all this data needs to be tracked. A lot of businesses don't know how to interpret the data. And that is where I'd say within you need to hire someone that can do that for you. It's super critical. If you don't know what's going on on your website, you can't make decisions to move forward. You can't make decisions to even change. It's one of the biggest questions I get asked quite often is the question I ask actually is why they say I need a new website. So why? And they can't tell me. It's usually because I don't like the design anymore. Yeah, I'm sick of the old one. And it's kind of like, well, it's not good enough to start from there. We need to start from a conversion. What's the performance look like? What are users going now? And where do you want them to go? And those are the things we need to measure and track. So making sure that that's set up whenever you get a new website built, make sure that it's being set up for tracking, Google Analytics and all those bits and pieces. Even heat mapping, if you want to go a step further to see what your user is doing. So we can make changes based on that data and not just finger in the air decisions that you're just pulling out of nowhere, right? Catastrophic. Yeah. wasted money. The last thing we want, and that's part of my business model, myself, is de-risking businesses from making decisions without being informed. Here's the shift. Good design reduces perceived risk. When things feel easy, the brain assumes they are safe. When things feel hard, the brain assumes they are risky. Second version is not only messaging, it is decision ease. One action for the listener this week, pick one eye traffic page, make one decision easier for your user today. Remove one point of effort. And that's ThinkShift. I'm Clint. I'm Leanne. One idea won shift in under 30 minutes. If this changed how you think, share it with someone who makes decisions for a living. And follow ThinkShift on all the socials. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss what shift is coming up next. See you in the next episode. Bye for now. This is a much made media production.