Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Using High Quality Pictures Can Dramatically Effect User Experience

By David Pareto


Enhanced online experience includes visually appealing images that keep visitor attention focused on the goal of the website goal. Quality photographs showcase products or ideas, deliver key messages, elicit desired responses, and direct visitors further into the website towards that goal. Using high quality pictures ensures the attention of visitors is captured and maintained. Efficiently loading web pages keep visitors engaged, making them eager to learn more about the content of the site. Efficiently loading pages enhance user web experience.

Quality photography gives potential guests their first glimpse of a website. This is the first opportunity to influence their decisions. A positive first impression increases the likelihood visitors remain and explore, or simply move on to another site. Thus, pictures are a key factor to ensure visitors remain at a website, and should motivate them to further explore its content. Quality pictures capture visitor attention making them more apt to stay and explore site content.

Placement of photographs on websites is much like the placement of items in storefront window displays. The items on display beckon passersby to enter. Website photography invites online visitors to explore site pages.

For sites that express ideas, or seek to influence decisions, photos can play a key role in persuasion. Visitors often act on their perceptions and first impression, and typically look before they read. Photography enhances first impressions and perceptions preparing site visitors for persuasion.

Imagery holds the power professional marketers and advertisers rely on. It is the force that drives persuasion and sales. If a website sells products, quality photos will be a primary factor in sales. Buyers want to see up-close views of things they want.

Pictures are like power-tools on websites. Online imagery can wow visitors, drive them further into a site, and convert casual onlookers into agreement, and/or influence their buying habits. Once a site has elicited the conversion of an onlooker to buy or believe, a smooth, efficient, direction towards the goal is the ideal experience. Pages need to load efficiently to keep users on the site's pages. They do not want to wait for pages to load!

High resolution pictures are large slow loading files. The quality of these images is high. However, they significantly increase user wait time. Web browsers can not load large files efficiently. This causes an interruption of user focus and attention.

Photographs optimized for smallest possible size (fastest loading files) while preserving the highest possible visual quality (resolution) produce the best online visitor experience. Savings of a few kilobytes on each picture can significantly increase speed at which an entire page will load, especially if the user views the page over a slow connection. Users with faster connection speeds expect quality photography with quickly loading pages that appear almost instantaneously.

The use of quality photography plays a key role in enhancing the online user's experience. Powerful imagery sells and persuades which adds value to a website. Photographs enhance the web experience by providing best visual quality, powerful first impressions, and efficient browser loading. High quality pictures elicit a conversion response, and keep visitor attention focused on the site's goal.




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