People connect faces with emotions. If we see someone on the street we do not like, it will cause us to feel negative emotions. People often say they have a good memory for faces. This is because nothing can create such an emotional connection as people. It is scientifically proven that newborns imitate human expressions the day after birth. This means that people respond to facial expressions long before they learn to communicate. People are able to recognize a face, even in the things around them. This is exactly the strategy we will discuss — your product may not have anything to do with a person, but that does not prevent you from associating it with personality. Personality is a platform for emotions.
For the connection to be effective, you must think of your company as an individual with its own opinions, traits, and specific features. For example, if someone says I’m an “Audi person” or I’m a “Mercedes person”, they are referring to specific aspects of their personalities. This is exactly the point you want to get across with your company. You want people to identify themselves with the “personality of your product” which will allow you to draw on with every subsequent opportunity.
“Humans respond to facial expressions right after birth and well before they learn to speak.”
The web page is actually just a conversation one party has already uploaded. You will need to decide, with whom do your potential clients communicate? With a serious person, a businessman, or someone who can take a boring job assignment and make something funny out of it?
In the book, Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter, Director of User Experience at Mail Chimp describes the creation of so-called “Design persona,” which describes how to transfer personality to design, interactions, and helps the team create a consistent result.
Transferring a personality to the web is not the same as making it fun. Not all websites require a fun personality. If it’s a serious business, fun personality will hurt rather than help. The point is to make the personality on the web resonate with the user and connect, not to make it unnecessarily over the top.
You also do not have to limit yourself to communicating your personality with just the written word. Only one part of the brain can read and talk, but the entire brain needs to be satisfied. Colors, animations, and images can communicate your personality and create emotion for the user.
In this case, the images are very important. But these are not just any images, but these are pictures of faces because nothing can make us feel so emotionally charged as images of faces. Our brain recognizes them very easily.
“The face immediately captures our attention and affects our feelings. We can see faces even where they are not.”
The Volkswagen Beetle, which was first manufactured in 1938 and was sold until 2003, has become the best-selling car in the world. It’s because of its design that resembles the human face. Volkswagen did not just make the people’s car, but a car that reminds us of a man’s face. The big eyes and smile on the front of the car bring a positive emotion to people, creating a special relationship between a man and the car.
Viewing a real human face has a much greater emotional effect. When browsing the web, the human brain is in the so called — “Scanning mode” and human faces are like a magnet for our eyes that pulls our attention away from other content like text and product images.
If human faces and testimonials are on your page together, try spreading them out more effectively across the page to avoid distracting the user from large portions of impersonal content.
Make sure they are not just on your home page, but across all pages. You want to have a face everywhere the customer clicks. You want them to capture the user’s attention, create emotional strongholds and force people to go further.
Some critics might argue that one’s face is associated with emotion, but human decision-making is a rational process in which emotions go aside. But that’s not the case.
People want to believe that every decision is made rationally and logically. In fact, however, emotional decisions are made first, and then we defend these decisions by logic.
So you have to show the customers why your product is as good as the others on the market, and then choose a specific way to show your customer that it exceeds all others, making it the only logical option.
“Human faces create an emotional connection with a person and have a great influence on his/her later decisions.”
If your website lacks faces, do not make it into one giant smiley face, which will discredit your product. In personal contact with your potential clients, the first impression is always important. You care about how you look, talk, or how you gesture with your hands. Your website represents your personality, and the visitors are creating an image of you and your product through it. Make it as perfect as possible.
