Text rules the internet. It has for years. From the early days of BBSes and Usenet to modern SEO-driven sites, the web has largely been an interconnected series of text documents.
But now pictures are making a play for dominance. With the rise of Pinterest, Canv.as, and even more image-driven sites, a new era of communication almost entirely without machine-readable text is upon us.
(This is largely due to technological reasons and the increasingly wide spread of fast internet connections. As the web becomes more media-driven and dynamic, we’ll see structures based on text metaphors fade into the background. We’ll still have text, but we’ll see a growing number of services based on images and video communication rather that long form text.)
In this post, I’ll look at some of the trends in UI design and think about how marketers, product managers, and internet companies can take advantage of this shift.
Are Picture-Based Sharing and Curation UIs Becoming Ubiquituous?
Just about everyone is familiar with Pinterest at this point, but in case you’re not, it looks like this. The UI is basically a stream of pictures with minimal text.
Pinterest looks oddly similar to Canv.as, 4Chan founder Moot’s entry into the social sharing space:
We also see this design pattern on highly shared, curation-based non-social sites, like ThisIsWhyI’mBroke:
HackerThings, a curated site of merchandise for ‘hacker-type’ people, uses the same pattern. And I want to buy everything on the site:
What Opportunities Does This Shift Create?
For Entrepreneurs and VCs
There’s a massive ecosystem of companies devoted to the production, quality assurance, and data mining of text on the internet. All of this functionality will need to be ported to images, and it will be technologically complex functionality to implement.
There will be a generation of companies that extracts data from this new internet of images. These use cases will range from reputation management (is a negative image of your brand getting hot on Pinterest?) to plagiarism checking to Nielsen-style ratings and affinity data aggregation.
Effectively every tool we have for dealing with the internet is built on the assumption that the data on the internet is largely made of text or some sort of form field. As this becomes less true, we’ll need a new generation of image-centric tools, which will create opportunities for a new generation of marketing tools vendors, or at least a very robust M&A environment for these companies.
For Marketers
Every piece of content you create should have a shareable image badge. Where a magazine has a pull-quote, you should have a shareable image. See, for example, this image from Josh James’ blog:
If I had a female-focused consumer web app, I would think about getting users to create personalized images (like the Visual.Ly Twitter Infographics) and prompting a shareon Pinterest. I think there’s particularly a lot of potential here with quizzes – give people self-descriptive quiz images and a Pinterest button, and watch the traffic roll in.
For Agency Folk
Find some marketer-designers. Much like agencies of the past few years have found marketer-developers and marketer-quants very useful, marketers that know how to communicate with images will be in demand. (This skill will probably be included in the ‘social media marketer’ roll.) This is a channel that can drive a lot of traffic for marketers smart enough to embrace it soon.
Additionally, get the rest of your marketers some Photoshop classes and some design thinking training. We’re only going to see more data and complex ideas communicated through images to save time, so everyone will need to know how to make graphics work for them.
Increasingly people will link back to your site with an image rather than a headline. If you embrace the curated image, you’ll receive disproportionate returns for the next 6-9 months, after which point it will become pretty normal.
What do you think of image-based sites? Are they here to stay, or a flash in the pan?
