Take a look at Apple’s site in 1997 compared to 2023:

They're not the only ones. Nearly every brand made this shift from busy to simple.

Simplicity beats complexity—that’s the idea behind processing fluency.

In short: we prefer things that are easy to read and understand (“fluent information”). Understanding something effortlessly helps us act quickly and confidently.

On the flip side, if you confuse, you lose.

If something is hard to understand, you're less likely to complete a task or make a decision. It takes extra brain power.

And when you're confused you feel like you need to examine something closely. Making it more likely you second guess yourself and not buy that weird product you saw on TikTok.

You may even value confusing products less.

How to apply this:

Make things as simple and clear as possible—particularly for conversion events (purchase, sign up, book a call).

• Keep navbars small (less than 7 links). If more, use dropdowns.
• Keep your writing at an 8th-grade level (reading level of the average American).
• Hold off on displaying popups until they're engaged. Wait a few minutes. 
• Reduce the number of fields in your checkout form. Use a single “Full Name” field. Don't ask for company name, website, phone number, job title etc etc. And use city and state auto-detection based on zip code.
  
• Get users to create an account after purchase, not before. Don't get in their way.

For conversion: clarity > cleverness.

MrBeast gets ~100,000,000 views per YouTube video. He doesn't make a video unless he can think of the perfect thumbnail and title for it.

A thumbnail really can make or break a video. 

The same concepts for a "hooky" thumbnail apply to ad creatives, social posts, and blog article thumbnails. Basically anything visual meant to hook people's attention. 

Here are ways top creators do that:

Big Numbers

Big numbers are unnatural. Unnatural events trigger curiosity. Particularly when it’s money.

Don’t make it too round, or it’ll feel fake. Write out the whole number to make it bigger.

Reactions

Dramatic faces attract attention. People click because they want to see what provoked it.

Your reactions need to seem genuine. Use a still from your footage, not a posed shot.

Ask a question

Asking a question in your thumbnail opens a loop that can only be closed by watching.

Use the video title to tease the answer you pose in your thumbnail.

For 9 more to hook with a thumbnail, dive into this carousel.

Don't be the best, be the only.

If you compete with all your competitors directly, you're playing on hard mode. You and your competitors will battle over the same features, and ultimately, price.

You need to find fresh market space.

To do that, you need to either normalize the weird, or weird the normal:

Normalize the weird

Juice shots, bone broth, staying in stranger's homes, and riding in stranger's cars—all pretty weird ideas when they first came out.

Now these are massive categories. 

Here's what you need to normalize the weird:

• Make the weird thing safe and familiar: "Your stay in Airbnb is 100% insured."
  
• Push into an existing category that people understand. Pick the right one:
• Juice shots' category shouldn't be “juice” as they'd be massively overpriced. But, as a supplement, they're a fresh alternative.

Weird the normal

If you sell a normal thing, tweak it a bit to make it weird:

• Put your water in a can and give it death metal vibes (Liquid Death).
• Put a giant cooling system on your mattress (EightSleep).
• Put your chips in a tube (Pringles).

All boring and mundane things twisted in some sort of way to make them more interesting.

Normalizing the weird is harder and riskier, but if you can do it right, it can really hit.

In short: You gotta be weird. You chose whether you make it more or less weird.