Most of the research that’s been done around images is centered around the technology itself, rather than the behavior. Alas, there’s not much we know about why images are important to people apart from what we can already assume.

The study wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, but it does provide a framework for understanding why we use images on the Internet. Essentially, it comes down to the four categories below:

• Learning/Research
• Being Objects of Communication
• Connecting with Remote Experiences
• Supporting Other Goals

These four categories explain at a very high level why images are important to people, but this alone is not enough. Let’s take a deeper look:

Learning and Research

Images are highly valued for their visual qualities. Without words, you can gain so many insights just by looking at something. However, in my study, I noticed four very clear patterns of image use related to learning/research. And they were all driven by slightly different motivations:

Supporting an interest or hobby: Sometimes images are the best medium to showcase the things that we love so much, from sports to books to photos of interesting pigs.

To satisfy curiousity: Some users did just that – search for photos because they wanted to know what something looked like (what does pelt look like?).

For discovery of new facts: This is when we learn new things just by seeing them and making sense out of the visual information (e.g. learning that there are two types of meat mincers from product photos on Amazon).

For ideas: And this is when we want to get inspired by looking at things in lots of different ways (one participant spent 2 hours looking at birthday cakes on Flickr just to get ideas).

Objects of Communication

Images are not just used for learning. They are artifacts in and of themselves, and are used in many ways to support social interaction. In the study, participants not only used images as ways to communicate (e.g. smileys, showing a photo of something without using the words), but they were also used for social activities, like games (e.g. name-this-person).

We’re extremely natural at collaborating with each other using visual things, as opposed to just words alone. Images weren’t just used as talking pieces – sometimes, they were the message themselves! It was quite funny to see how people loved to use photos to replace words.

Maybe that’s why LOLcats is funny – it’s like having an invisible 3rd person giving an odd punchline.

Connecting to Remote Experiences

Our brains are hardwired to visual and auditory stimuli, so sometimes images (especially really large, high-resolution photos) act as windows to places and experiences we want to connect to -  our memories and our imaginations. The study showed how large photos were used to connect people to physical locations, past experiences, to connecting with friends and family, and even with personalities (e.g. celebrities – Michael Jackson died in about the same time the study was carried out).

Supporting other Goals

One of the most insightful things I’ve learnt is how people use images as sort of a swiss-army knife of the web. It’s used as a replacement for text, for getting past poor text search results, for sorting out navigation in a geographical space.

Alternative Answers: Images can be used to get around the limitations of text, language, and meaning. One participant was searching for an authentic Mexican dish, but Google search is awash with American renditions of the dish, which of course, wasn’t authentic. Google Images to the rescue – she found the recipe she wanted instantly because she knew what she was looking for.

Indexes: Have you ever tried searching for a music album that was a Japanese import, that was only distinguishable by the way the album cover looked? Some search results don’t reveal those things, and sometimes you just want the exact one you saw in the store. Thankfully, most e-commerce sites feature a screenshot of the product, and users do rely on that for efficiency and accuracy.

Maps and more: Sometimes, maps aren’t enough. Users are smart enough to look for visual cues like landmarks, photos of store entrances, the location of potential parking spaces (StreetView), and so on. Sometimes, if an image doesn’t provide enough information, look for another image.

More than meets the eye

I think we’ve only just begun to understand that behavior, while complex and sometimes idiosyncratic, doesn’t just happen without a reason. The purpose of this study isn’t about predicting behavior – it’s about understanding why something might be likely to happen, so that we can make the right design decisions to anticipate for those behaviors if they do happen.

It’s also about testing our own assumptions about how people use images on the Internet. The model presented here is only a starting point. I believe that as interactions become more complex and multi-modal, this may well change and evolve over time.

Note: here are the slides for the presentation I gave at NordiCHI 2010.

Visual Thinking for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

I was one of the lucky winners of this book from Morgan Kaufmann after I donated some money to the IxDA fundraising initiative. After turning in my MSc Project dissertation, I finally had some time to catch a breath. You’d think that reading a book on Visual Thinking would be the last thing on my mind after losing weeks of sleep to writing… I’m surprised myself.

Anyway, at a glance, this book is about understanding how we as humans interpret and interact with objects and environments visually. It’s written mostly from a psychologist’s perspective, and provides useful references to the theory and science of visual perception, cognition, attention, etc.

Colin starts off talking about how the eye and brain processes and perceives visual stimuli, and each chapter concludes with a set of design recommendations. He gradually works upwards the abstraction layer, dealing with topics like color and shapes, the relationship between visual and verbal processing, the process of “seeing” or “thinking” by sketching, leading up towards how we perceive meaning in a visual world.

I felt that I understood the subject matter a little better because I learned about cognitive science during the HCI course, so readers who are new to psychology may initially find it slightly alienating. I also feel that designers who are looking for design ideas may not find this book as an inspirational resource. I see this as reference material – something you pull out to make sure you’re doing things right, like getting more substantial evidence to support design ideas in problem solving.

It’s also a fairly easy book to read. Despite references to psychology terms like V1, V2 and top-down/bottom-up, the author succeeds in explaining things in simple language, and provides good examples of how the science of visual perception is linked to visual design.

The best parts of the book lie towards the end, and I think that the early chapters act as building blocks that support the overall perspective summarized in the last few chapters. The gist of it is that our mind, eye and body works together to look for patterns in the world, and that understanding how this takes place can aid designers in helping users to make sense of things more clearly and easily.

The implications on p. 172 are a key takeaway:

1. to support the pattern-finding capability of the brain; that is, to turn information structures into patterns
2. to optimize the cognitive process as a nested set of activities
3. to take the economics of cognition into account, considering the cost of learning new tools and ways of seeing
4. to think about attention at many levels and design for the cognitive thread.

(The word ‘cognition’ refers to the “process of thought”, i.e. thinking.)

In summary, this book is worth an investment. It’s one of those resources I will occasionally refer to for clear, evidence-based recommendations for visual design.