How Visuals Influence Decision Making And Persuade With Data
Visuals are being utilised more and more in Business. From Presentations on Prezi or PowerPoint to Advertising or Internal Communications. Visuals are perhaps the most useful tool at the disposal of any Business today.Catching Attention
Firstly, we gotta look at the obvious reason Visuals can help in decision making. Most people will walk down the street, completely ignoring their surroundings. Suddenly however, their eyes glance over a Newspaper Stand with a large bold headline and the picture of a Celebrity hiding from the Paparazzi.Visuals Catch The Attention of a potential Audience. Everything down to the font and its style can be included in this, depending on what you're doing. This is because 90% of any information we receive is Visual. A Similar Scenario can be used when sending important emails to work colleagues. The yellow highlight shows them they should check out this email. Then a Banner or image roughly showing what the email is about, in this case a meeting. This then reels them in. You’ve made the first step on influencing decisions, grabbing their attention, now you need too…
Hold Your Audience's Attention
So, everyone got your email and has turned up for your meeting. But, they're bored, it's half past five and they want to get back home to catch the football or binge the new season of the Witcher.You’ve caught their attention with your flashy Visual Email, but how are you going to hold it? This Meeting is about the performance of your office, a rather boring topic, how are you going to make that interesting?Visualising it ofcourse. Not just with bar graphs and charts, bit Visual and possibly mildly comical, representations of people working or exchanging goods.When building a Lego set as a kid or with your Children today, you probably never noticed the fact the instructions were entirely Visual. This is ingenious because everyone across the entire world can understand what's going on. What if those instructions had been a wall of Text? You probably would have given up and gone to play GoldenEye on your old Sega.A similar change can be seen in modern Video Games ironically, gone are the days of large Video Game Manuals where you had to learn a large series of Controls. Now in a few short and often story based Missions you can learn the basics of the Game.These two examples show that Visuals are friendlier and HOLD YOUR ATTENTION. You don’t get bored of figuring out how to build Lego, you don’t get overwhelmed with instructions and abandon the game. Of Course you also bought both because the Visuals on the Box caught your attention.So for the rest of your Presentation, make sure to use as many Visuals as possible, perhaps utilise Visual Storytelling? But now you have managed to hold their interest, you need to…
Get Your Key Points Across
When watching an advert for a new car, you’ll often have a Model or a Celebrity looking beautiful and showing off the features of the car like its mileage, or what colours it comes in. Mostly the Celeb or Model tells you how cool you’ll look or how useful the car will be for your job.You're told the facts and can see visual representations, a dashboard for speed and mileage. Shots of the car driving in stunning settings for looks. When a feature is described, it is shown, the Key Point the marketing team wants to put across is shown VISUALLY.So now for a narrowed down part. As you're talking about rising costs and profits, have a short animated graph appear as you talk. Don’t oversaturate it, at these key moments, focus your Visuals in. In the car advert the Celebrity pulls you in, the flashy aesthetics of the ad hold your attention and then closeups show the key points. This is that moment for your presentation. You want to make sure everyone has understood what you're saying. They don’t need to remember everything, just the key things that will help you too…
Persuade Your Audience
The year is 2006, Doctor Who successfully stormed back onto our television screens and now it was time to sell some toys. A big chunk of this was sorted, kids ofcourse wanted to play with the Doctor and Rose, but, how would they Travel in Time?Eventually the Tardis Playset would appear, but how do you convince Parents they should spend all this money on a hunk of plastic? All the previous pieces fall into place, the flashy Doctor Who Logo and Theme play on the telly. The kids excitedly watch the ad as the Doctor and Rose push dials and ‘travel through time’. Your interest is held because the playset looks pretty decent for a toy. Then clips of happy kids playing.Boom, the Persuasion is there, you can make your kids happy if you buy our playset. But how does that help you at your presentation?You have grabbed and held everyone's attention and shown them your key points. So, how are you going to improve productivity and beat the scores and profits you just presented. By Visualising greater success. Graphs showing higher profits and increases in wages/bonuses. Perhaps visuals showing better Working spaces or a new coffee machine. So you grabbed their attention, held it, gave them key information and finally persuaded them to push harder. And the best part is, next year, you’ve got to organise this meeting all over again. But now you know what to do.What's better is that as the other examples given show, these tips are fairly universal. It's just about knowing how and where to apply them. If you're stuck, we can help with that. Natalka Design is Designed to help you get your point across easier, help people understand your brand or event. Feel free to check out our services to see how we can use Visuals to help you or check out some of our other Blogs!