Why do some websites create a strong connection with users while others make them leave within seconds? Often, it has nothing to do with what you offer or your pricing, but with something subtler: your UX/UI design isn’t considering your visitors’ emotional needs.
The Stanford Web Credibility Project, developed by the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, studied how people assess the credibility of websites. In one study, 2,684 participants were asked to rate the credibility of websites in ten different categories. The results showed that 46.1% of users based their credibility assessment primarily on visual aspects, such as the overall design, typography, font size, and color scheme.
This trend was even stronger for websites in sectors like finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce (46.2%), and slightly less common in health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit websites (39.4%).
These findings highlight the importance of visual design in how users perceive website credibility, showing that people often judge a site’s trustworthiness based on how it looks—before even considering the content.
So if your website has low conversion rates or a high bounce rate, it’s worth reviewing whether its UX / UI design has been built with the emotional experience of your customers in mind. It may look nice on the surface, but still fail to connect with your audience. In this article, we’ll explain what emotional design is and the key elements we apply at Pukkas when implementing it in our clients’ websites.
What is Emotional Design in UX / UI and how can it boost your ecommerce?
Emotional Design in UX / UI is a discipline that aims to create emotional connections between users and brands by designing digital interfaces that are not only functional and beautiful, but also memorable and capable of triggering emotional responses in users.
The 3 levels of Emotional Design in your User Experience & Interface
Emotional design is a concept introduced by academic Donald Norman. He originally called it user-centered design, but the concept evolved into what we now call emotional design or affective design. According to Norman, there are three levels of emotional processing that affect user experience and should be considered when designing a website if we want it to connect emotionally with potential customers.
- Visceral Design: This is related to the immediate, unconscious response users have when seeing a design. It is mostly driven by elements like color, shape, and typography. This reaction is deeply rooted in human evolution and allows us to quickly assess what we see. Ever heard the phrase “first impressions matter”? This is exactly that.
By carefully crafting the elements that influence that first impression, you increase the chances that the user won’t leave your website right away. - Behavioral Design: This affects user satisfaction while using the website. It focuses on the usability and functionality of the environment, making sure the user feels confident and comfortable while interacting with it. Here we include the most technical aspects of web design.
- Reflective Design: This involves the conscious thought process where users reflect on their experience with the website. Unlike visceral design, reflective design is highly influenced by the user’s social and cultural context. That means a website might be perceived as “cheap” or “premium” depending on the visitor’s background.
Reflective design is the one that can vary the most from one brand to another depending on the target audience and the image the brand wants to convey.
As you can see, in great UX / UI design, it’s not just the technical aspects of behavioral design that matter—connecting with users emotionally, through visceral and reflective design, is equally important.
4 Key Benefits a Good User Experience Can Bring to Your Online Store
In today’s highly competitive digital landscape—where customers have countless brands to choose from—a UX / UI design that is emotional and impactful can make all the difference in your ecommerce success. It allows you to build deeper relationships with potential customers and directly influence their behavior, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Here’s what emotional web design can do for your business:
1 – Increased retention and loyalty rates
If users connect emotionally with your website across all three design levels, they are much more likely to return and purchase again—and even recommend it to others.
2 – Improved brand image and awareness
Creating a website with emotional design in mind helps communicate the core values that matter most to your target audience. This strengthens your positioning as a reliable and professional brand in your industry.
Among the three levels of emotional design, reflective design is the most decisive in this regard.
3 – Reduced bounce and abandonment rates
Users may leave a website even after just one minor negative experience or detail they didn’t like. Emotional design seeks to minimize friction and create pleasant, meaningful interactions.
4 – Higher ROI and conversion rates
Brands that connect emotionally with their users are more effective at guiding them to take action, and they also reduce the cost of acquiring new customers by making the most out of their existing audience.
How to Connect Emotionally with Users Through UX / UI
We’ve talked a lot about emotional connection—so what does that actually mean?
Beyond creating a website that is comfortable, functional, and visually appealing (which are mainly the goals of visceral and behavioral design), emotional design must evoke specific feelings that strengthen the user-brand relationship.
We’re talking about emotions like trust, credibility, belonging, closeness… These are just examples. The specific emotions you aim to trigger depend on your brand, your values, your goals, and your ideal customer. But the idea is always to influence user behavior through emotion.
Let’s say your goal is to convey security. That feeling can be transmitted through your web design using the right elements, such as:
- Colors, typography, and visual elements that reflect your brand’s personality and the emotions you want to evoke. Red, for example, evokes urgency or passion, while green tones represent freshness and nature. Typography also matters—some fonts communicate professionalism, while others feel more casual or playful.
To illustrate this, take the project Somiaz, an app for sleep management that we worked on. We chose a soft, clean font and pastel colors to evoke calm and peace—the kind of feeling you associate with sleep. Had we used dark reds or blacks, the user wouldn’t have connected emotionally with the brand or felt comfortable using the app. It likely wouldn’t have had the same success in attracting users.
- Small illustrations that make the experience more unique and memorable. This is often referred to as iconography, and it plays a big role in setting your brand apart from competitors.
For instance, here you can see some custom icons our design team has created for various clients. These icons reflect both the sector and essence of the brand, while also adapting to the style of their target audience. In the case of Moventia, for example, the goal was to communicate modernity and innovation, while still appearing approachable. That’s why we created iconography that aligned with current aesthetic trends but remained perfectly understandable.
- Animation and microinteractions: These are fantastic tools for creating emotional connections. You can design custom animations or visual effects that react to users’ actions—for example, buttons that change color when clicked.
This makes your website feel alive and well-crafted, giving a stronger sense of dynamism. You can try this yourself on one of our clients’ websites: Croexsa.
- Videos: These have a full sensory impact and are capable of expressing even the most complex emotions. Plus, videos are easier to remember and help increase brand recall.
Besides emotional UX / UI design, another essential way to connect with users is through great UX writing. The words and content on your website are powerful tools to emotionally engage your audience.
We Help You Create a Unique Digital Experience
If you need help creating a truly one-of-a-kind website that emotionally connects with your customers, Pukkas has a creative design team that applies everything we’ve explained here—and more.
We love discovering new projects and giving them a unique, tailored touch. Shall we talk?
