Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/images-text-important/
Technology has changed the modern world greatly in recent years and, in particular, it has changed the way we seek and perceive information.
People simply have less time for the deep and thorough reading our parents might have done a generation ago. Most of us deal with many input sources — the web, email, twitter, SMS, IM — so we tend to naturally favor any information that can be grasped in seconds, if not instantaneously.
Our brain is designed to process the world in a visual form. It’s part of our ‘native OS’. For at least 40,000 years, humans have been transferring information from one person to another with a help of images, pictograms and graphic symbols.
Photo : goforchris
Text is a ‘kid brother’ by comparison. The first evidence we have for written communication appears in Sumeria around 2600 BC — an evolutionary blink of the eye.
Children start their learning process with the use of picture books. We’ve all noticed that kids are much more likely to engage with a book that has pictures than text-heavy book? Even older children (and, many adults for that matter) often only become engaged with a book after they’ve watched the movie that was based on it.
Why Are Visuals So Engaging?
It’s conventional wisdom that people in general don’t read on the Internet. A recent study claims that users mostly like and share posts after scanning a few first lines or even just a headline.
So, if your well-considered and wordy Facebook rant gets a batch of likes, don’t assume your followers actually read it. It may be more of an high five for effort — especially if you have a cool image there.
Another recent Twitter study shows that tweets with photos and images are more engaging for users than text-only tweets. The key reason for this trend is that images speak directly to our emotions. Images get fed straight into our subconscious, unlike text symbols which need to go through a ‘decoding step’.
Color, size and shape of a visual element evoke various feelings — anything from warmth to anger to joy — and can even push us to engage with a brand, share a post or buy a product.
Credit :NeoMam Studios
Another part of the explanation is that visual images appeal to both the left and right sides of our brains, engaging our logic and imagination at the same time. Actually, the growing success of infographics is a plain evidence of this idea.
What About Text?
We can’t imagine today’s world and web without text. A picture may well be worth a thousand words, but it’s likely a different thousand words for each of us. Text gives our ideas a precision that we can rarely approach with images alone.
Text also plays the central role in SEO, being the only data we can say with certainty that search engines understand perfectly.