The first reason why visuals are essential to effective web content is simply because a large percentage of the population relies on visual content when processing information. Studies have shown that approximately 65% of the world’s population is visual learners, meaning they require content to be broken down into smaller chunks of visuals to properly engage with what’s being displayed in front of them. Rather than plain text, 40 percent of people respond better to visuals while only 20 percent of what’s written in your content, will be read. A real-world example that we discussed in class, refers to the IKEA assembly guide. The guide demonstrates visuals of the assembly but with a cartoon figure, avoiding as much text as possible. IKEA uses the analytic facts of how 65 percent of the world’s population are visual learners and only 20 percent of plain text will be read. They utilize a strong strategy to properly relate and engage with their consumers while being both impactful and memorable over text communication.
2. The second reason why visuals are essential to effective web content is because of how visuals stick to memory much better over long-term periods. Researchers have studied the effect of text-written content and how individuals retain it after three days, which comes out to only 10-20 percent. On the other hand, visual information holds a value of 65 percent and growing, after three days of retaining the content. The science behind this study is that naturally our brains transmit 90 percent of information to visuals. Meaning processing an image at just 13 milliseconds, and registering 36,000 messages per hour. Implementing plain text instead of visuals into web content will gradually slow down conversion rates from mobile users as 53 percent of those users will leave after just three seconds of the page not loading properly from large summaries of text needing to be downloaded onto the device before being seen, keeping in mind that mobile accounts for 60 percent of web traffic. Compressed images and icons that are less than 300KB and utilize formats such as WebP, AVIF, SVG and JPEG, can reduce slow speeds as they use much less storage and data to download. A real-world example of this is when you are at McDonald’s and prefer to order online through the app’s menu. Upon opening the app, you are greeted with a high-quality, responsive visual of the cheeseburger deluxe, rather than lines of “Cheese Burger Deluxe, made with 100% Canadian Beef and loaded with your favorite condiments”. Referencing back to how humans process an image at just 13 milliseconds, when they view the visual of the juicy, vibrant burger appearing so quickly on their device, the user will identify what they want and complete the order before even reading the line of text.
3. The third reason why visuals are essential to effective web content is that visuals can trigger strong emotions. Our brains store our visual memories inside of the medial temporal lobe, it processes emotions and expresses them. In class, we discussed the impact of a cigarette awareness image and how it made us feel. Negative images like the cigarette awareness, create a stronger trigger for emotional emotions. Researchers can’t actually prove why this occurs but the way I see it is that when a negative image is being displayed, individuals tend to pay more attention to it, rather than if a positive image was shown because it sends alerts to the brain that there is a “threat” and that they need to “survive” by avoiding the danger. In addition, 40 percent of people respond better to visual information. So the cigarette awareness image can actually emotionally motivate individuals to quit smoking as it shortens their lifespan. A real-world example of this is the MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) association and their powerful story-telling images. Triggering the connection between visual stimuli and medial temporal lobe of the brain, it creates the alert of threat and survival, capturing the attention of the reader and promoting motivation to not drive under the influence.
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