You Looking at Me?

Part of the reason that quality photography has become essential to our clients is that marketers have to optimize visual impact.  Capture attention or  you lose.  What is making this even more important these days is that more and more browsing and booking is being done on mobile devices, which translates to smaller screens.   Photography has great impact on a small screen where a block of text may not be as inviting and is best suited to vital information.

Jakob Nielsen's (refered to as the king of usability) post, explains that most of our visual attention is focused on an F-shaped pattern when viewing most web content. In other words our eyes start in the top left and then go right( I'm surmising that this is trained by reading), we then move down the left side of the page tracking to the right with decreasing intensity.

Another interesting tool is the  3M Visual Attention Service.   It creates a heat map on images and graphic designs to determine what will gain a viewers attention.   The video is quite articulate in explaining the need to maximize imagery so that we create the "collective impression" in the viewer that we set out to.

You'll notice that they reiterate my mantra that you have to capture attention and help people form a positive first impression within 3 seconds.  Their analogy of a relationship is apt, because that is precisely the connection that you want to develop with a visitor to your property's website.   Make them fall in love and want need to know more about you.

I'm going run some images and hotel websites through VAS in the near future to do a defined study of various designs.