Don’t Read This

Until You Look at it First.

A 20-second look, a 2-minute read & satirical insight into content, user experience, visual appeal and their effect on landing page design.

In a world where search engines have decided “content is king”, we often find plenty of it. Thousands of words scrambled across a page, usually attempting to build compelling content around a specific topic with the intention of building authority and improving search rankings. However, sometimes it appears as if the “king” likes to ramble, on and on and on. While a bot scouring a site may get the fuel needed to rank a page, the user may find it difficult to understand the benefit behind the message or moral of the story, particularly if the content is not visually compelling enough to convey the most important message.

Let’s face it – People don’t read.

Ok, that may be an over exaggeration, or is it? With hundreds of thousands of articles with millions upon millions of words, users are flooded with information on any topic they want and now thanks to major search engines they have it whenever they need. Why should they care about you? The new question is no longer are you creating well-written quality content with engaging quotes, analogies and statistics. The new question is….

Are you paying attention?

Well, are you? This isn’t just a question for the user. Make it easy for the user to quickly receive your message.

Reinforce that throughout your content.

People want to pay attention, but their time is short and full of thousands of distractions. Work, the phone, that surprise meeting, kids pulling at their pant leg, dishes in the sink, or that new episode of “wait, were you trying to tell me something?”.

We have become a society of “busy”. Sure that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the only one that matters is you right? Your several-thousand-word article with emotionally compelling content may have the stuff to engage the customer and sell the product… IF they have the time, and desire to read it. And if that time is not now, you may have lost them. When do you think they are going to have time for your beautiful story if you didn’t catch their attention now?

So get to the point already!

Artfully crafted articles compel people to read and keep them engaged…. but only if they are interested. So how can we keep the focus on the most important thing we are trying to say. Everyone knows the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”, yet we often fail to utilize visual storytelling in our content, landing pages, and most often in our words.

Both have the same content…..

Which would you Look At?

  VS.  

Did you feel the instinctual urge as your eyes were drawn from left to right?

Try it again, even if you want to focus on the left image, you are distracted by the right.

Make the distraction count, and make it valuable.

Do you get the Picture?

A children’s story book is a great example of visual storytelling. The boy who cried wolf is a perfect example. While the imagery helps to pull you through the story, you still have to read the whole story to get to the moral at the end. In modern times, publications have had to utilize design, layout and formatting to draw out and emphasize the key points of articles. Some great magazines and publications have spent years to perfect the art of using simply words for visual storytelling.

When We Fail,

take a moment to think about what the user really saw…..

Do the opposite of this.

I might have taken the point to an extreme in this case. After all these words that you probably didn’t read most of, I can only hope that I wasted as little of your valuable time as possible, and hopefully with a sarcastic smile. If it was important, you probably went back to read it completely. If you didn’t read and only skimmed did I get the point across? If even one of you…

Understood? – Leave me a comment.

By: Jeff