- As discussed in class, please provide three reasons why visuals are important to web content. Please ensure you go into detail for each item. (6 Marks)
Visuals are important for web content as they stick in long-term memory, transmit messages faster, and trigger emotions.
Visuals have the ability to stick in your audience’s long-term memory. As we discussed in class, pairing concepts with meaningful images is an easy way for people to store them in their long-term memories.[1] A study found that after three days, someone retained almost 65% of visual information compared to it being written.[2] Visuals have the ability to be remembered in a way that written forms of content cannot be, which is why we need to utilize visuals throughout our web content. Your audience may read all of your content, but you can’t guarantee that they will remember everything or anything by the end of it, which isn’t necessarily good for your business if people don’t remember your content. With an image, your audience can quickly look and see the visual along with the minimal content attached to it and process and retain the information just based on the visuals provided. If I were to look at a post that a business made and it had a cute dog on it, I would remember that dog image over any kind of written content. Then the next time someone mentions that business or I see the business online somewhere, I will go back to the dog visual and instantly remember since the image is in my long-term memory.
Visuals are also important for web content because they transmit messages faster. People are going to process visual information more efficiently than text.[3] Knowing this, it is important for businesses to understand that having visual web content is key to having your message delivered effectively to your audience once you know that visuals are being processed 60,000 times faster in the brain compared to text.[4] Readers are going to see an image and will immediately have some kind of understanding of what they are looking at, over giving them paragraphs of content trying to describe or explain something in text form. A picture is worth a thousand words – this goes along with why visual content is so important because an image has the ability to convey a story way more effectively than words ever could. Using visuals will grab the reader’s attention much faster, allowing them to quickly get the message. This is very helpful because many people have a short attention span, so if the message isn’t like a visual that gets the point across short and sweet, then you have the chance of losing your audience.
Another reason is that visuals trigger many more emotions than words do. When something triggers someone’s emotions, it will usually stand out to them and form a memory. From one of the PowerPoints, I have learned that visual memory is encoded in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, which is the same place where emotions are processed.[5] When people are emotionally impacted, they are usually going to remember that time so by having a visual that gets someone’s attention in an emotional way they are typically going to remember it. If you look at an image and someone looks happy or sad you are usually going to also have that same reaction and emotion as the picture, this is something that words won’t be able to do as quickly as visuals can which is why it is so important that they are placed in web content. A business is going to want viewers to feel a certain way and remember them by it. If there is a visual of a sad dog that is being used by an adoption center to promote adopting animals, you don’t need words to describe what the feeling is. Viewers are going to see that and immediately feel sadness and empathy for the dog. It's going to make them create a memory of the business and remember that picture forever because it created an emotional impact on them. With these strong feelings of emotions, there is a better chance viewers will take action and want to adopt a dog. This is why visuals are important for web content because they can trigger many more emotions than text can and it will happen in a faster way since it only takes 13 milliseconds for the brain to process an image.[6]
[1] Briscoe, W9 - C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 5
[2] Briscoe, W9 - C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 7
[3] Briscoe, W9 - C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 9
[4] Briscoe, W9 - C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 8
[5] Briscoe, W9 - C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 14
[6] Briscoe, W9 - B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, Slide 4