eCommerce Website Design Trends 2023: How Color Psychology is Vital

Having a well-designed website is incredibly important in regard to your company's success. In fact, 94% of people reject a site chiefly because of poor design.

But design features, capabilities and trends are perpetually evolving and if you don't stay up to date with the latest eCommerce website design trends, it becomes very easy to fall behind to your competitors.

Each year, new concepts and ideas are introduced to capitalise on user patterns and concepts that were once irrelevant can quickly become important. To ensure that customers have the best shopping experience possible on your website, reevaluating or redesigning your eCommerce website every year will help you optimise accordingly.

But this does lead us to some important questions that you'll need to answer in order to achieve this. Namely, what are the current design trends? What are the design trends for 2023? And with everything changing so quickly, just how do you keep up with design trends? Read on for our web design colour guide.

The Benefits of Staying Up-to-Date with Design Trends

Staying up-to-date with design trends is important for designers, marketers, and businesses of all sizes. By keeping up-to-date, you can expect to experience the following benefits:

1. Ensure your business stays relevant - By keeping up with the latest design trends, designers and businesses can ensure that their visual communication remains relevant to their audience. Design trends reflect the current aesthetic preferences of society, and staying current helps designers and brands stay relevant and appealing to their target audience.
2. Improve user experience - Keeping up with design trends allows designers and businesses to create designs that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also functionally sound. Design trends often reflect new developments in technology and user behaviour, which can help designers create designs that provide a better user experience.
3. Gain a competitive edge - Staying up-to-date with design trends can give businesses a competitive advantage in the marketplace. By creating designs that are visually appealing and functionally sound, businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors and attract more customers.
4. Improve your brand identity - Consistently incorporating design trends into a brand's visual communication can help establish a strong brand identity. A brand that is associated with contemporary and innovative design will be perceived as more modern and dynamic than a brand that is associated with an outdated design.
5. Provide inspiration for your team - Keeping up with design trends can also provide inspiration for designers and businesses. By staying current with the latest design trends, designers can explore new techniques, colour palettes, and other design elements that can spark their creativity and help them produce innovative designs.

What Happened Last Year?

Sometimes to see improvements in the future, you might have to take a step back and ask: What are the design trends for 2023? This information may still be pertinent as a lot of the features that saw success will still be effective in the new year. Last year saw the rise of videos and animation in the backgrounds of a website's layout, especially sporting or gym-related companies like Bionic, as a means to instantly display the energy and drive they possess.

On the other hand, KLM incorporated built-in micro-interactions better than almost anybody else while 2023 saw the rise and implementation of chatbots across a huge swathe of websites as a way to offer instant communication with potential consumers. Last year also saw more companies place an emphasis on particular colours and the psychology that can be associated with each one.

Why Colour Psychology is Important

So what exactly is colour psychology? Essentially, it's understanding how colours affect perceptions and behaviours. In marketing and branding, colour psychology is focused on how colours impact consumers' impressions of a brand and whether or not they persuade consumers to consider specific brands or make a purchase over another.

It's an important field of study to consider when creating marketing assets, building a new business, or rebranding an existing one. One study even found that up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be attributed to just their colour alone.

Although, the right colour won't solve everything. It won't make people instantly interact with your company because everyone has a different perception of something based on personal preferences, experiences, upbringings and cultural differences. But what is important is that you find the right colour that aligns with your brand's personality and appeals to your specific audience.

Finding out what is the colour trend for 2023 alongside doing further research into the psychology of colours and the impacts they have, can make all the difference when it comes to connecting with people. This is why colour psychology and web design need to be considered carefully when designing your site.

Colour theory for web design

Colour theory is an important aspect of web design, as it can have a massive impact on the complete look and feel of a website, as well as its effectiveness in terms of engagement with users and conversion rates.

Below, we’ll look at the five key principles of colour theory that can be applied to web design.

Colour wheel

A colour wheel is a tool used by designers to understand the relationship between colors. Red, blue, and yellow are the three primary colours. Secondary colours are created by mixing together two primary colours, and you can create tertiary colours by mixing a primary colour and a secondary colour.

Colour harmonies

There are several different colour harmonies that designers can use to create a cohesive colour palette.

• Analogous colours are those that are next to each other on the colour wheel and create a harmonious, calming effect.
• Complementary colours are those that are opposite each other on the colour wheel and create a high-contrast, energetic effect.

Colour psychology

Different colours can cause people to feel different emotional responses. For example, blue is typically associated with trust and calmness, while red is linked with energy and excitement.

Designers can use this knowledge to create a website that resonates with the target audience and reinforces the brand's messaging.

Contrast

Contrast is an important aspect of colour theory in web design, as it can help to create visual interest and draw attention to important elements on the page.

High contrast is often used to create a sense of energy and excitement, while low contrast is often used to create a more relaxed and calming effect.

Accessibility

When choosing colours for a website, designers must also consider accessibility for users with visual impairments. Colours should have enough contrast to be distinguishable from each other, and text should be easy to read against the background colour.

All in all, colour theory is an important aspect of web design that can greatly impact the effectiveness of a website. By understanding the principles of colour theory and how they can be applied to web design, designers can create a more engaging and effective user experience that resonates with the target audience.

Other Elements to Consider For eCommerce Design in 2023

Alongside colour psychology, there are a number of other key design elements that you will be need to consider in order to succeed in 2023:

• Mobile Efficiency – A huge percentage of online shoppers now prefer using mobile devices to shop. These changes mean one thing: creating e-commerce websites for mobile-first users is only set to rise. This means seeing more mobile-friendly features on eCommerce website themes such as long scrolling pages, card-like layouts and more finger-friendly icons.
• Chatbots – As mentioned earlier, chatbots that incorporate artificial intelligence are becoming more and more common. They can answer questions, help with purchase decisions, offer discount codes, and deliver shipping notifications. With more and more users now expecting chatbots as a standard part of user experience, considering them as a part of your overall design should be a priority in 2023.
• Voice Integration – Your goal should be to give visitors a great shopping experience irrespective of the device they are using. With more and more internet searches being done vocally, if you are still not optimised for voice searches, then 2023 should be the year you change that.
• Originality – Custom photography and videos will become more common in 2023, as the reliance on stock imagery should begin to decline. More and more brands are looking to tell their stories, display their products and connect with users in an original way, but using stock imagery it negates the whole concept immediately. To stand out from competitors and display authenticity to customers, 2023 will see the rise of original and custom imagery in relation to website design.

eCommerce Web Design Trends 2023

So those are some of the elements you will need to consider, but let's now take a look at the main website design trends that are going to take eCommerce by storm in 2023. Here are the main eCommerce design trends you can expect to see a lot of in the coming year:

• Minimalism - Let's be clear, minimal doesn't mean boring and empty. You can still utilise bold colours and bright fonts. Minimal means giving your products the platform and the space to take centre stage and shine brightest. Tinker Watchers are a great example of stripping back all the unnecessary design aspects, championing their products and making it easy for customers to interact with them.
• Multi-Directional Layouts - Multi-directional layouts are a popular eCommerce website design trend that has emerged in recent years. This trend breaks away from the traditional grid-based layout and introduces a more fluid, organic approach to website design. Instead of having everything neatly arranged in rows and columns, multi-directional layouts allow for more creative and interesting design possibilities.
• Dark Mode - Dark mode switches the background of a mobile operating system to black, reducing eye strain in some environments, and enabling mobile devices to better adjust to ambient lighting conditions. Staying ahead of the curve and thinking about dark mode during the initial design stages, as opposed to it being an afterthought, will offer a great user experience for people who utilise this function regularly.
• 3D Graphics – With the rise in virtual and augmented reality capabilities, people are increasingly looking for an immersive experience online. This is where utilising 3D graphics can help deliver great UX. Offering smooth and satisfying interactive motion designs can create unique product views for your customers, something The Cool Club achieved in an incredibly brilliant way.
• Micro Animations - Micro animations are a popular trend in web design that involves the use of small, subtle animations to enhance the user experience. These animations are often used to provide feedback, draw attention to important elements, and add personality and character to a website. One of the main benefits of micro animations is that they can help to create a more engaging and interactive user experience. By adding small animations to buttons, links, and other elements, designers can give users a sense of how the website responds to their actions. This can make the website feel more intuitive and responsive, which can help to keep users engaged and on the site for longer.
• Centred Navigation Menus - Centred navigation menus are a popular trend in web design that involves positioning the navigation menu at the centre of the page, rather than at the top or side. This design trend can create a unique and distinctive look for a website, while also providing a number of benefits in terms of usability and user experience. By positioning the navigation menu in the centre of the page, designers can create a more symmetrical layout that draws the eye towards the content. This can help to create a more harmonious and aesthetically pleasing design that is easy on the eyes.
• Being Bold - So, the minimalist approach may not be the best one to showcase your company. In that case, going to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and being as bold as possible might be a better decision. More and more companies, Brewdog as an example, go big, go brash and go bold. This works across all devices and can really draw the eye to the places you want it to go. It makes it simple and instantly accessible, so expect to see a lot more of this approach in 2023.

Final Thoughts

Understanding techniques and trends that will affect web design in 2023 can be all-important to achieving eCommerce success. By undertaking your website design with care and paying attention to every detail throughout the process, you can create a brand that is recognisable, and that resonates deeply with your target audience and customer base. It can seem like a lot to digest initially, and staying on top of trends can be a big ask, so partnering with experts, like Appnova, who have industry-leading expertise in regards to designing an eCommerce website for the retail sector can be a great first step to take.

This blog post is Last updated on May 24th, 2023.