The Halo Effect And Web Design
‘The Halo Effect’ was popularised by a man called Edward Thorndike in 1920. He’d run a psychological study asking commanding officers how they’d rate their soldiers, & found that the ratings were almost totally polarised: A soldier either had ‘all good’ traits or ‘all bad’ traits. In reality, this was not because the soldiers were all good, or all bad. It was just that commanding officers had a tendency to recognise one particularly good trait (or one particularly bad) & extrapolate that to form their entire view of the soldier. ie. lots of black, lots of white, very little grey.
This is also often quoted as the reason behind those “tall, beautiful people are more likely to succeed” studies: On a rational level, we all recognise there’s no correlation between height/beauty & ability, but on an irrational level there is a correlation between height/beauty & perceived ability. Picture an imaginary successful person in your mind: How tall are they? How good looking?
This is the halo effect: One very positive attribute in a person or object can affect how we think of the object as a whole. We hear that a particular celebrity we dislike has just given $10m to charity & suddenly our entire view of them changes (or - the opposite - we have such a negative opinion of them that the charity donation is somehow twisted to reflect badly on them; we look for ulterior motives & ask “did they really need to shout about it?”)
The Halo & The Web
It’s worth recognising that your website’s visitors can be affected by these halos: If your site looks a certain way, visitors may extrapolate that further into the way they think about you, your site & your business. For example: if your success relies on a feeling of “polished, secure, attention to detail”, yet your site looks clumsily put together, your visitors will extrapolate this.
If your site feels a certain way, your visitors may extrapolate that too: A lot of dead ends, difficult navigation, broken links & you begin to feel untrustworthy, not customer-focused. Whereas - depending on your audience - simple navigation, helpful pointers, help messages in all the right places can have the opposite effect.
If your site reads a particular way, that halo will cast its glow on other aspects of you & your site. Funny writing = funny business = funny staff (even though rationally, it’s probably only one member of that staff that’s writing for your website). Knowledgable writing = knowledgable business = knowledgable employees (again, you may only have one knowledgable writer on staff, but the website’s halo will rub off on the rest).
The Eye Of The Beholder
One thing to remember in all this is your target audience. It’s pointless to put together something really flashy if you’re trying to appeal to “play it safe” pension buyers. “Flashy” may read as “risky” to them. Jakob Nielsen gets to make 5-figures an hour with one of the plainest website on the web (useit.com), because it fits in with his target audience, their expectations & their biases. Wikipedia (which looks especially studious) is as trusted as Merriam Webster (which is packed full of ads & exclamation marks), despite the fact that MW has a ton of fact-checkers & Wikipedia is written by anonymous amateurs.
Think about the emotions you want to evoke, how you’d evoke those in your particular target audience, and how using your website to achieve that could cast a glow on the other things you’re trying to achieve.
