Anyone who has ever felt better as a result of adopting an amusing perspective on an otherwise difficult situation will know just how important humour is in day-to-day life. It is uniquely human, and can have various benefits for one’s health, such as reduced stress and a heightened tolerance for pain.
You may therefore be interested in learning which parts of your website design may be most improved with some tasteful and well-judged doses of humour. Well, here are a few suggestions.
The ‘About Us’ page
This is the page of your site that many visitors will look to for a sense of the ‘human’ side of your brand, which could make it ripe for an injection of humour if appropriate. You could have images of your staff, for example, adopting wacky poses or even wearing funny outfits.
News and update pages
These are parts of your site that can feel a little grey and tedious, especially when you have important, but otherwise boring news to share. You might want to take a look at the changes and updates feed at Slack, for example, to see how a lightly humorous style can help to make those important news developments sink in better with readers.
The ‘404 error’ page
It’s frustrating to find yourself at a dead end when you are looking for a particular product, service or page online. A well-done humorous 404 page can therefore be helpful for lessening some of that frustration. However, it’s equally vital to pair any ‘jokey’ error 404 content – many examples of which are brought together in this Usabilla blog post – with a means by which the visitor can get to what they were looking for, such as a search box or navigation link.
The chatbot
It is becoming increasingly customary for chatbots to be used in website designs for organisations in almost all industries. Given that a chatbot is, after all, effectively there to replace a human, you should consider ways in which yours could be given a more ‘human-like’ personality, as may be achieved in part with some well-judged humour.
Blog posts
A website’s blog has long been a key frontier for businesses seeking to give their online presences a dash of down-to-earth personality. Humour – including in bullet points and embedded media such as images and video – can certainly be incorporated to great effect in blog posts. However, a generally relaxed conversational tone can have a similar impact. In short, we would suggest that when in doubt, you go for the subtle rather than laugh-a-minute approach.
It’s important to follow the principle of ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’ with your use of humour in your web design – not least as there are definitely instances in which using it at all could damage the user experience and by extension, your brand.
Nonetheless, humour – when handled well – can be a key weapon when you are seeking to make more of the right impact with your target audience. Contact the Piranha Designs team today, and we can discuss with you in greater detail all of those little touches that could help to elevate your custom web design from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
