Each time we hear the word story, the first things that come to mind are animated movies, our favorite movies, and series on Netflix, or even our favorite books when we were kids. Why? It’s because they’ve left a lasting impression on our hearts and minds, made us feel as if we’re a part of the story with our own specific role, inspiring us to visualize every character in our minds.
These days, this is what users expect from their mobile apps. With so many choices, they look forward to interacting with apps that serve them the best services, as well as providing a story for them to live on. One effective way to make this possible is through looking ahead to mobile UI/UX app design visual storytelling.
Table of Contents
Visual Storytelling—an Understanding
Put simply, visual storytelling is what the term instantly implies. It’s all about narrating a story via visuals, such as illustrations, graphics, images, infographics, moving photos, and videos. Visual storytelling could make a robust impression on the audience’s minds.
Humans are visual creatures and the human brain has an entire lobe, which is the occipital lobe that’s dedicated to sight and processing visual information. Also, parts of the lobe are dedicated to processing information visually seen. With so much of the brain dedicated to sight, it comes as no surprise that the brain could recognize an image in as fast as 13 milliseconds, which is less time than it takes to process text or speech.
Unlike bits of texts or pieces of information, a visual story is accompanied by images that could more easily emotionally engage the audience. Visual storytelling, as long as done correctly, could really create a strong emotional impact on the audience. Storytelling goes back to a truly old tradition that’s intertwined with how a human looks at things and interprets these things meaningfully.
Through the ages, it has been a consistent part of each and every cultural expression, entertainment, and meaningful human communication. The visual storytelling concept is greatly implemented in the designing and reviewing a mobile app UX process to avail of a myriad of benefits to customers and brands alike.
A lot of times, users don’t interpret written words in your app the way you want them to. Now, visual storytelling showcases visual elements, which generate an impulse in their minds as well as attach some meaning to what customers see.
Visual Storytelling—Key Principles for UI/UX
In mobile app UI/UX design, visual storytelling already has come of age and has been used extensively across mobile apps and websites across different niches. While mostly they’ve been proven as most effective for driving user engagement and business conversion, there is always room for improvement.
Check out the key principles of UI/UX design visual storytelling.
1. Knowing Your Audience
While designing UI/UX in mobile apps, the prime objective would ensure optimum engagement and acquire a better response. Obviously, this requires knowing the target audience, what their preferences are, their learnings, as well as their behavior patterns.
2. Create a Strong First Impression
For any digital or mobile app, the first impression plays the most critical role. Thus, your visual narrative has to be instantly engaging, to help users relate fast. Today, users are mostly on-the-go, thus you have to build a positive impression as soon as you can.
3. Simple, Interactive, and Easy
Your visual storytelling should be easy to understand, simple, and interactive. Tell a short and sweet story with seamless and immediately recognizable visual elements. A simple, easy, and interactive UI/UX with things such as app animations could drive engagement fast.
4. Make Sure to Induce Positive Emotions
Another important factor is to build a positive vibe with your visual story. A positive impact by the visual story integrated into UI/UX design always helps convert more sales and help your business achieve its goal.
5. Using an Appropriate Typeface
Use the right typeface together with visuals in the UI/UX design. By choosing the mutually appropriate or perfectly contrasting typeface and images, you could deliver a better design. Always, typeface helps extend the impact of design beyond clichés.
6. Genuine and Audience-Specific
To create visual stories, you could always make use of stock images. Nevertheless, stock images make a false impression that your content is not authentic and genuine. Furthermore, stock images lack the culture-specific element that connects your target audience. Thus, using authentic images in your visuals all the time is paramount.
7. Humanize Your Storytelling
Never forget to integrate a human element in your visual narrative since most users relate to a story easily when it talks about people and real-life human scenarios. Always humanize your storytelling to encourage users to take action.
Benefits of Visual Storytelling for your UI/UX Design
Easy Remembering
Because a human brain could analyze and process a story more effectively compared to other kinds of communication, using visual narrative in your app design lets your users remember the story more easily. Furthermore, this technique boosts the chances of the audience connecting the story with certain times, places, and materials that enhance the chance of them to remember the story further each time they visit or see all the places and things.
Better Comprehension
Most of the time, users don’t interpret written words in your app the way you want them to. Thus, they’re unable to get the main idea and respond in the same way. Visual storytelling showcases visual elements, which generate an impulse in their minds, as well as attach meaning to what they see.
Greater Leads
The visual storytelling concept also helps businesses to boost their sales. With the technique, users could easily relate to the story’s main character, the choices that character made, and therefore be able to make up his or her mind. Eventually, this boosts the chances of them making up their minds to purchase your products and services.
In Conclusion
There are a plethora of advantages to your business with visual storytelling for your mobile UI/UX app design. However, it’s only possible if you create the right blend of creativity, hard work, innovation, and honesty.
Regardless of your goal, visual storytelling should boost UX, which leaves your users a resonating message in a visual way. It could be simple or complex. You can easily convey it into a single image or in a 20-second video that should stoke interest and invoke emotion.
Thanks for reading this article. You can subscribe for regular update about technology news and tips via RSS Feed.