Design is obviously very important for your e-commerce portal, visitors are heavily influenced by your designs and it affects their behavior at so many levels such as:

• It can motivate customers to browse through your portal 

• It can engage them with your content 

• Force them to click your call to action buttons 

• Checkout your products, etc. 

In fact, the design is the first thing that makes impressions on the customers. Actually, before interacting with features,functionalities, or the vast amount of products, they interact with the design of your portal and if the design is not good then they are most likely to drop your portal. 

You need to create a design that connects with the customers psychology and affects their shopping behavior. This includes many different practices but there is one particular concept "Visual Cue" that we are going to cover in this post. 

What are the visual cues?

Visual cues or directional cues are the elements on the e-commerce portal that specifically draw attention to certain sections like CTA or a product and help customers to interact with the portal. Visual Cues highlights the important information so that visitors know exactly what should they are looking for, rather than browsing the entire portal. 

There are two common types of visual cues such as explicit and suggestive.

Explicit cues involve line and arrows pointing to an area of importance while suggestive cues use the image of people looking at an area. Explicit cues are the most straightforward techniques and they are commonly used on landing pages to guide visitors to a particular section. 

Suggestive cues work well because we humans have the ability to determine where another person is looking. So, designing the page where the person is looking at the important area may increase that visitors will shift their attention to that spot. 

The explicit and suggestive are the most common cues but there are few other types as well. 

White Space

Areas of emphasis are surrounded by the white space guides the visitor's attention to the specific area. Including the plenty of white space is actually a core of the component of writing an important or scannable text that readers can easily get. This concept is also applied to the visual cues because it helps to isolate the primary area of interest where eyeballs just stuck. 

Designs like this helps the e-commerce portal to highlight the offers, sales,discounts, and many more. 

Color Contrast 

You can use the color contrast techniques on the page to bring the visitors attention to a particular section. The difference in color should make the visitors focus on the contrasts, that increases the chance of clicking on the CTA. E-commerce portal can use this type of design to engage users for longer time and convince them to make purchase. 

Encapsulation

Encapsulation or the farming of elements is the another great way to highlight the important area of the page by creating an enclosed window of focus. Instapage explain that "designers often use the boxes, outlines,or contrasting colors to reduce the page clutter and draw attention to specific elements." Generally, the CTA is encapsulated in the box or in the center of the screen that is nearly impossible to miss.

If you are running an e-commerce portal then this is the most important design pattern for you, it helps you convince visitors to click on the CTAs. 

Why do Visual Cues work?

Actually we humans are so visually oriented by nature, we easily get influenced by Visual Cues. Most of the people pay more attention to the superficial elements of the page than the actual content. But that doesn't mean that content is not important or matter, it is very important but the overall design of your site matters a lot even more than content.

Visual cues are perfect for steering visitors to a particular area so that crucial information is not overlooked. On web pages a lot of  information is present but the visual cues show users exactly they need to look. It is so easy to use, designers just need to just slightly adjust the design that's it. 

Remember that overall look and feel of a portal determine how long visitor swill hang around and how much they want to explore your best e-commerce portal in Saudi Arabia. You can say that Visual Cues are one of the very basic aspects of the designs but it has a very big influence on the visitor's perception. In last we can say that success is based on your visual cues to follow the best practices and experiment as much as you can. As an owner of the e-commerce portal it helps you to convert the random visitors into the loyal customers.