- 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)
As we discussed in class, visuals are extremely important to web content for several reasons, three of which are:
- Visuals Stick in Long-term Memory
- They Transmit Messages Faster
- They Improve Comprehension
Visuals Stick in Long-term Memory
First, visuals are important to web content because they stick in long term memory. As discussed in class, the average human attention span is 2.8 – 8 seconds (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 13). Knowing this, as advertisers we use visuals to capture the viewers’ attention with visuals and use them to give users important information quickly that will stick in their brain long-term better than written information. A study found that after three days, 10-20 percent of written information is retained compared to almost 65% of visual information (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 7). This along with the fact that “65 percent of the population are visual learners” (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 4), proves that people remember visuals and graphics at a much higher rate than written content. Therefore, visuals are one of the most important aspects of web content and getting users to remember our content long term, which allows them to recall our content and advertisements, leading to 100% higher engagement and 42% increased retention (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slides 9, 12).
They Transmit Messages Faster
Secondly, visuals are important to web content because they transmit messages faster. As previously mentioned, the average human attention span is 2.8 – 8 seconds, giving us a very short amount of time to transmit messages to our audience. Visuals help us with this because they scientifically are processed much faster by the human brain than written information. One statistic that demonstrates this is that “visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.” (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 8). This shows us as advertisers that written content cannot compete with visuals when it comes to quickly transmitting a message. Another statistic states that, “it takes only 13 milliseconds for the human brain to process an image” (Briscoe, W9 – B – The Power of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 4). This is extremely important to us advertisers because we have such a short amount of time to get our message across to our audience. Using visuals makes the information exchange from us to our viewers quicker and more efficient, which allows us to respect our audience and give them the important information in a way that they can easily process and understand.
They Improve Comprehension
Third of all, visuals are important to web content because they improve comprehension. Visuals are a powerful tool that we can use for web content because they have been found to improve learning by up to 400% (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 11). In advertising, we want our audience to feel like they understand the message and get value out of it, and there is no better way to accomplish this than to use visuals. When informing people on the web, infographics do a much better job than written text does at ensuring that viewers understand the message because our brains are pre-wired to interpret relationships between objects, which allows for instant comprehension (Briscoe, W9 – C – Importance of Visuals (W25).pdf, slide 13). Knowing this, there is zero reason not to use a visually appealing infographic to relay important information to our audience so that they quickly understand with almost no effort.
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