Recommendation One (Enhance Visual Accessibility and UX)

St. Clair should prioritize enhancing visuals on their website as it is highly cluttered and makes for an uninviting user experience. Using proper imagery and including more students on the home page would be a good start. It would cater to the diverse needs of the incoming local domestic students. With the website’s layout, St. Clair also has a section that locks the user into scrolling left or right, which feels wrong as users aren’t accustomed to this.

This section should be changed to accommodate the local domestic students and their parents. One option St. Clair could do is show scholarships and bursaries on this and make it static so new students can easily access them without going through a bunch of pages to get there.

Recommendation Two (Clear Visualized Academic Programs and Pathways)

To help incoming local domestic students explore their academic interests and career options, St. Clair College can visually represent their programs and career pathways on its website. This would almost be like an open house but online and just for the programs; instead of going on campus, the potential students could see the overview of their program and past student success stories. It would help them see if the program is right for them and take out the guesswork. A local student could see a timeline of sorts of typical career pathways in a visualized form. Visualizing this pathway and programs will make it easier for students to understand the education journey they would need to take and help align their future goals with their careers. Additionally, as stated earlier, St. Clair College can incorporate testimonials and past success stories from alumni who have pursued similar academic paths and provide incoming students with real-world insights and inspiration.  

Recommendation Three (Adding Social Media Feeds and User-Generated Content)

St. Clair College can integrate social media feeds and user-generated content into the homepage of its website to create a dynamic and engaging UX for potential incoming local domestic students. St. Clair can make their site more geared towards incoming students by featuring visually appealing posts and helpful information from the college’s official social media channels. Using the user-generated content from faculty and alumni, the website can also provide authentic glimpses into campus life, events that are happening, and student accomplishments all in real-time; this will also save St. Clair time and money as it will be automated and won’t need to be check unless doing quality control. This interactive approach showcases a more vibrant side to St. Clair and encourages prospective students to connect with the college and the surrounding community. Using user-generated content also fosters a sense of belonging and inclusivity, which the page is lacking.

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We Found Over $5,000 Worth of Vintage Tees At The Windsor Goodwill!

While searching through our local Goodwill we came across this $1000-dollar Nascar Tee and many more high-quality vintage pieces. Want to see this insane find closer? Click on the button and it’ll take you right to our store page!

What is important to your business and visitors?

Through this visual focused post, we are targeting the quality and authenticity of our vintage, and we are using emotional and story telling elements to get our post across to the users.

Quality and authenticity

Visitors who click on the post seek unique, high-quality vintage they can’t get elsewhere. Therefore, it’s of the highest importance that we show our consumers that we source everything authentically, aren’t buying fast fashion, and stay as sustainable as possible. In doing this, we are showing consumers that we are trusted and that we can maintain customer satisfaction.

Emotional Connection and Storytelling

Our target audience would find this post very emotional, as anyone who has thrifted before has felt the rush when you find unique pieces. We are targeting this within the image and making it as easily digestible as possible so the consumer has no problem connecting with the blog post. The image also tells a story, as the consumer can immediately understand what the post will be about. We also have a CTA in the blog post to get consumers back to our site. It gives a surprise element as the consumer wants to know how much we listed the shirt we found on our site.

A. Why did you choose the specific image(s)? (3 Marks)

We chose these images based on their visual impact. The first image conveys excitement, surprise, and the thrill of uncovering hidden gems at the thrift store. It draws the reader’s attention and piques their curiosity. This image is also relevant to the quick headline we gave and visually reinforces the narrative of our post. It indirectly showcases the valuable and unique items we find while outsourcing for the shop. There is also the extreme emotional appeal of these specific images as it’s capturing a moment of discovery we made. It showcases the anticipation and satisfaction of finding these items and creates a connection with our audience as we invite them to join us on our sourcing journeys. The close-up of the Nascar tee allows us to place a button under it so the consumer knows they will go back to our website if they click it. We know the consumer wants to get an in-close look at the tee shirt if they click on the blog post, so that’s what we are giving them.

B. Explain in detail why the image(s) was beneficial for the post. (3 Marks)

 The images were beneficial to the blog post because they show visual engagement. The image instantly grabs the viewer’s attention with its bright colours and high price tag, giving excitement and surprise to the blog post and encouraging the user to explore further. Visual engagement is critical for retaining users’ interest, especially with how much content is at the user’s fingertips today. Without the images we used, readers would be disinterested in what we are writing, and no visual stimulation would be used. The storytelling portion of the post would be missing as our text directly speaks to the images, and the images carry most of the elements that would keep a user on our blog post.

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Visuals are important to web content due to 65% of the population being visual learners

This means that most users, if not all, of the users coming to your website are looking for images or visual stimulation. This is either conscious or subconscious for the user. Visuals help summarize content you make into smaller chunks for the user; it’s more understandable than text or audio. Three reasons why visuals are essential to the web are one, visuals stick in users’/consumers’ long-term memory; two, visuals are transmitted into the user’s head faster than text, which helps when users have so much content at their fingertips; and third, Visuals trigger emotions more then the text would. These aren’t all the essential benefits, but these are the three main points we talked about in class.

Visuals Stick In Consumers Long-term Memory

According to Dr. Lynell Burmark, and supported by research findings, visuals can stick in our long-term memory. They compared text to images and found that verbal information tends to pass through short-term memory more quickly as long-term memory directly stores images. This means users retain images for a longer period, which can relate to brand requisition and sales later down the funnel. Jandhyala, D. (2021, May 12). Visual learning: 6 reasons Why Visuals are the most powerful aspect of eLearning. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/visual-learning-6-reasons-visuals-powerful-aspect-elearning For instance, if I were to show you a picture of a t-shirt with my brand logo on it, you would keep that in your long-term memory for longer than if I was to explain what was on the t-shirt in a paragraph. Visuals can also help aid users with text. Instead of just using text or visuals, the best way to ensure the user stores the information you want them to for a long time is to combine images and text. In doing this, you add more context and meaning to the content. Using images within content in the future is extremely important as it not only retains to longer memory but also gets the user to remember key information that will get the user to act upon your content and advertisements.

Visuals Transmit messages Faster than text

The human brain processes visuals faster than text. The brain can register images in milliseconds, and visual information is transmitted to the brain 60,000 times faster than text.

This is why our brain loves pictures | International Forum of Visual Practitioners. (n.d.). https://ifvp.org/content/why-our-brain-loves-pictures

This indicates that visuals play a massive role in directing attention and more efficiently engaging users with our content. When we are using structured content, it’s important to plan out your information so you can remove text and add images instead; this will, in turn, capitalize on the brain’s ability to process visual information quicker and more efficiently. Forty percent of nerve fibres are also linked to the retina. This is one of the reasons that we process information faster through images and visual content. ImageThinkNet. (2023, November 14). Vision In The Brain: Is it True or False that vision rules the brain? ImageThink. https://www.imagethink.net/true-or-false-vision-rules-the-brain/

Using images and visual content, with or without text, will help users read our content faster overall. This will help with the F-pattern and reverse pyramid, as users will stop to take in the image instead of scrolling past it. It’s also a great way to direct users’ attention to an area we want them to see. This is an important reason why visual content is so important to the web.

Visuals Trigger Emotions

Visuals not only help convey information and allow users to consume it faster but also help trigger an emotional response. Visual cues can evoke emotions and create a stronger connection with the audience; this is a vital tool that allows us to hook the audience or user into buying from us. When the user finds visually compelling content that resonates with them emotionally, it will lead to a more memorable experience for them. For example, if we created an image of us finding vintage Jnco jeans at a Goodwill, it would give our target audience excitement and hope that they might be able to find something like that, too. Emotions are also processed in the encoding of visual memory, which further emphasizes the link between visual and emotional responses. Using visual content to evoke emotion isn’t just for the positive, though. Using negative emotions in visuals can leave a strong emotional response and sometimes be better for advertisements than positive ones. Consumers tend to remember negative emotions more than positive ones. For example, would it stick in your head more if you gained $20 dollars or lost 20 dollars? The answer is always lost. Incorporating these emotional triggers through visual content adds another level of depth to our content and helps with trust and gaining a stronger connection with the audience.

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