"Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge” – Plato
Whenever you take action, you made a decision. Decisions come from choices or options that are present at that given time. But what made those options available in that moment? The answer is human behavior.
From observation or people watching, you can learn a lot about others through their behaviors and patterns. Coming from Plato’s quote, human behavior comes from desire, emotion and knowledge. Desire is the ability to attract through our physical form. Emotion is the ability to attract through our feelings. Finally, the part that keeps people interested is knowledge or the ability to attract through our personality, sharing of experiences and thoughts.
To know who you are is the first step in understanding the behaviors of others and to captivate your ideal clients or customers. By using all three of those concepts to entice and fascinate your visitors to your website and business, we designers, developers and you can better prepare what the website will become. To begin, who are you and why are you unique?
How Does Human Behavior Relate To Web Design?
To capture your audience’s undivided attention, your designer and developer needs to understand and follow a set of guidelines to improve human-computer interaction when using your website. From Human Behavior Theories That Can Be Applied To Web Design , your visitors must have a sense of growth, autonomy and self-reliance while browsing your website. How?
Follow the Hierarchy of Six Website User Needs:
-
Accessibility – can be found and used by everyone online including those with disabilities
- Can the URL address be typed easily
- Can the font be read
- Can visitors interact and contribute with no problems
- Is the navigation simple to understand
- Is the website design flexible enough to meet different user needs, preferences and conditions
- Is it following the coding standards setup by W3C for accessibility
- Stability – consistent and trustworthy
- Is it loading properly for every page
- Is the navigation and design consistent throughout all pages
- Usability – user-friendly experience for the visitor
- Reliability – consistently available in terms of no/few downtimes
- Mostly related to server or host reliability rather than stability of the site itself
- If people cannot reach and see your website, your business do not exist
- Functionality – do the contents, tools and services offered provide value?
- Is the website serving its purpose
- Is it useful or informative
- Is it intuitive and to the point
- Is it helpful and simple to use
- Flexibility – adapts to the different needs and wants of its users and visitors
- With the exponential growth of different mobile devices, your website needs to be responsive (resizes and adapts to any browser) regardless of how wide or tall the device it’s being viewed on
- We are not exactly sure of the user’s browser environment while creating the website so designers and developers need to think and plan ahead to make the website appealing, fluid and readable in any size or form
- Images for desktop vs. mobile devices must load fast and be as high-resolution as possible no matter what the internet connection speed is
These are the big picture requirements that must be followed to improve human-computer interaction and behavior. But how exactly are these done with web design and development? What are the roles specific to the designer, developer and you in order to follow all six of these fundamental user needs?
To find out, plan on reading the next blog post about how the theory of Model-View-Controller is part of the reason for website behavior. Are you ready to learn more or is your curiosity only skin deep? Do you not want to show an improved version of you and your business? How?
“Your beliefs don't make you a better person, your behavior does.” - Sukhraj S. Dhillon
