Is Your Website Neurology Friendly?

Our experience of the world is created by gathering information through the use of our five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell).   Each of us tends to develop a favourite mode of focus.  Some people are more impacted, for example, by what they see; their visual system tends to be more dominant.  For others, sounds are the trigger for their greatest life’s experiences, while for still others, feelings are the foundation.

Based on our past life experiences, we all use different parts of our nervous system when viewing situations in life, the three main ones being visual (sight), auditory (sound) and kinesthetic (touch).  So whatever experiences we have stored in the mind are represented through these three major modalities.  Sometimes one of these will produce a particular result or it could be a combination of all three.  We also all learn and absorb information in different ways, some learn easier by seeing things, others by hearing things and others by feeling things or again a combination of two or three modes.

In designing a website would it not make sense to try and produce a web site that would have an even balance of content so as to appeal to the three major modalities?  It would be crazy just to aim our site at a visual person as we would be excluding customers who fall into the auditory and kinesthetic modalities.

In my own personal experience, I know that a website that is comprised of mostly text does not motivate me enough to stay on the site and read pages and pages of text.  I would far rather see some graphics and good pictures – that is because I am a “visual” person. But on the other hand a site that is full of clashing colours and bright flashing banners would quickly make me close the browser!

With wonderful technology today, one can easily cater for the auditory person by installing a video with sound onto your website.  There are plenty of people who would rather hear things than read.  They love talking websites.  One does need to ensure that the recording of the voice is of good quality and the tone and speed of the narrator is such that it will not irritate the listener. 

As for the kinesthetic person – as he cannot actually touch the web site, the design needs to be such that it presents a warm, friendly “feeling” that will motivate the kinesthetic person to read and may be listen to your site.  Graphics and pictures would need to be really good, for example pictures of carpets need to portray what it would actually feel like to walk barefoot on them!  A picture of an apple would need to stimulate the actual feeling of biting into a lovely juicy apple!  A travel site would need to reveal pictures of holiday destinations that stimulated feelings within the kinesthetic viewer that reminded him of a previous wonderful experience.

So designing a website to cater for all three modalities could actually be a lot of fun as you try and put yourself in the shoes of each of the modes and try and experience what they would see, feel and hear so that you can then transfer those experiences into the design of your website.  Of course, we cannot cater for all, but we can give it a good try!

Making your web site easy to navigate is really important as one can get easily frustrated when getting “lost” on a website.  Provide a good roadmap!

Of course there is another really important visitor to your website who you have to cater for and that is the search engine robot!!!!  But of course he is not concerned about aesthetics or feelings or listening to what the site has to say – but he likes a really good roadmap too!   What the robot is looking for would require another article to be written.

Have fun creating a website that appeals to as many people as possible and you will surely see your stat counter soar!