Visual Storytelling
Making stories authentic, compelling and human
While written text may be an efficient way to communicate a story, visuals have immense power over just simply using text. Visuals have the power to drive authentic, compelling and impactful stories in a way that is personal and humanised. They engage us on a much deeper level. In the age of social media, our visual literacy has grown. And we retain and understand things better when we see, rather than just hearing or reading content.
Understanding
current practices
When we spoke to sellers about introducing more storytelling to their listings, one of the things we heard again and again was:
Buyers don’t care about reading all that text!
Two insights we
drew from this:
1
When sellers thought about telling a story they were almost always thinking about delivering it in textual form.
2
Sellers identified that visuals were highly important to buyers and that was where they channeled their energy.
Although they acknowledged the importance of visuals, sellers were not using them to communicate their story.
Practices on
Social Media
And we knew that sellers were more than familiar with using visuals to tell a story because they did it all the time — on social media! Below is an example of The Ice Cream Cookie Co.’s use of visuals on their online site vs their Instagram page.
Online Site
Instagram Page
Why we went
Visuals First
We knew visuals are important to both buyers and sellers but what if we pushed it a little further by encouraging more experimental and explorative forms of photography?
We went with a ‘Visuals First’ approach because we thought, how awesome it would be if you could understand a product through the way it was styled and photographed!
Explore the ways we did it
Thought starter
What are other ways to encourage visual storytelling in online e-commerce apps?
Thanks for sharing!
