
Written by:
Achraf Hazim

A picture is worth a thousand words. A video can tell a thousand stories.

For many years, use of visual content has been the best way to make your website stand out. Recent studies show that people are 80% more likely to read a piece of content paired with imagery. With the exponential growth of apps like YouTube, Vine and Instagram, businesses have quickly seen the potential of videos and how influential they can be.

Video is able to bring dynamic motion, bite-sized information to consumers and even a narrative to direct visual attention. Here are some examples of video used to enhance visual communication/UX:

•    Gifs to showcase how the UI applies to UX.
•    Animated Ad Banners.
•    Hero banner videos/background images.  
•    Online marketing campaign

Research tells us that videos provide customers with a better form of assessing products through visual movement, sound and space. Through the medium of video, consumers are far more confident in their decision making when purchasing a product.

Video can come in many forms, all of which bring a new narrative and purpose. For example GIFS are often used as ad banners, quickly showing your products and on-going sales that you can click into. However, despite increased bandwidth growth, size still plagues videos in all forms. So it is important to have a fine balance between file size, purpose and quality of any given video.

Interestingly, by having video content on your website, you are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results. This can have a huge impact on your traffic and business as a whole.

Psychology of video

Reading text and viewing a video both involve completely different cognitive functions. Thus, there is a need for businesses to understand that both processes are different.

We process videos a lot faster than reading a piece of text. This is because watching videos is much more of an automated brain process so less active thinking is involved. 

However, reading content requires us to actively filter through the information, hence the longer processing time. When reading, we create thoughts about the content we are reading, stimulating our mental structures. 

Conclusively, motion on a website is a lot more captivating than static content. With larger Internet bandwidth comes better quality and longer videos. Making it easier to create video content that is pleasing, informative and efficient.

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