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2019: Top 10 blogs

[ Part 1: The story in the stats]

I used so many words pondering archives, bonfires and identity in Part 1 that I didn’t have space to reveal the top ten blogs of 2019.

Here they are:

  1. Social anxiety on social media (FEBRUARY 18, 2019)
  2. Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on (JANUARY 18, 2016)
  3. Designing story (3): Archetypes and aesthetics (MARCH 5, 2017)
  4. Katie Hopkins’s #myfatstory is a story of vulnerability (JANUARY 5, 2015)
  5. My top blogs of 2018 (DECEMBER 23, 2018)
  6. Semiotics: Finding meaning in storytelling (NOVEMBER 14, 2016)
  7. Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data (APRIL 14, 2016)
  8. The inner life: Tarot and technology (APRIL 18, 2019)
  9. Social-psychology-the-social-animal-on-social-media (1) (JANUARY 20, 2016)
  10. Maslow’s hierarchy of social media (APRIL 14, 2015)

As I said in the big data blog, the stats Jetpack collected didn’t seem to match up with the rest of what was going on my website. Often, I get people wanting to pay me money to either buy links or publish their content, which seemed a bit strange since Jetpack said that on average 12 people a day visited my site. So, I went back to the raw data on my cpanel which said that I get 1.2m hits a year around 300,000 people which was a huge surprise.

But, looking at raw data can take some time so I installed WP Statistics for a brief overview, which was nice for a while, and it is where I drew the above list from. At first, I thought that given that the data was only collected over a few months that it would be really different. However, it wasn’t. I compared the above list with previous years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and yes, it’s really similar except for the new number one: Social anxiety on social media which was amazing really as I felt quite vulnerable writing it and didn’t want to feel that raw and naked and fretted a lot about it. However, I am glad I did as it seems to have helped other people which is so lovely and I did a follow up vlog about social anxiety and emotional resonance as I really think that they are linked.

Three of the blogs also appeared on the all time Top Eleven Blogs (JANUARY 27, 2018) which I wrote to celebrate having blogged here for 11 years. Though the actual stats were from Jetpack which I installed in 2012 so instead of all time it should be of all six years which is not quite as dramatic, alas, I do like a definitive answer, we all do, we desire certainty.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself gazing again at my stats instead of blogging and this was around the same time I realised that there’s no real point sharing my blogs on Twitter and Facebook it doesn’t really affect the stats, unless it is something like the Comfort blog which is about grief and my mum and family resemblances. I got some click throughs from Facebook because I keep in touch with friends and family who knew my mum though I felt a bit shy talking openly about my feelings in front of people who have known me all my life, which is a bit odd when I think about it, as I say I always think I am blogging in a void and I am free to say whatever I think here. There was nothing at all on Twitter because that’s a different group of people and no one cares about my grief or feelings on there.

This is interesting (I laugh when I write this because my PhD supervisor used to say that it was not for me to say) because I read some research ages ago about being a different person on different social media platforms using the honeycomb model and I was not certain, especially when you use something like Jetpack as you can use its Publicize which just publishes every blog on every platform, and many businesses do the same. They will post the same content on every channel. But, since I had deleted Jetpack, I had to make the decision each time whether to share a blog or not, and then I found that I was getting navel gaze-y about it and didn’t feel that I wanted to share a post because no one cared, and so I was showing up differently on different channels, even though I didn’t believe it as I want to believe that I am consistent – what the heck? Why do I want to think that? Why is consistency so important to me? Apart from in HCI of course! I am allowed to change my mind. We are all allowed to change our minds. It’s how we grow. I’ve been blogging here so long now that I have expressed opposite opinions on the same topic quite a few times as I’ve learnt more or thought more. It’s all progress, and we say different things to different groups of people all the time, back to emotional resonance again, why waste your breath explaining your feelings to people, as my troll put it (hey babe), who just don’t give a shit!

The interesting thing (see again) was that WP Statistics showed me that regardless of whether I publicised my blogs on Twitter or Facebook or not at all my stats remained the same. So, that felt good, I don’t need to rush about on social media when all I want to do is blog, blog, blog. With that realisation, I deleted WP Statistics as I didn’t quite understand some of the interface and I couldn’t be bothered to learn how it should work, and also I had begun to create content specifically tailored to an audience, which would have – as you can see from the list – eventually led to more Katie Hopkins blogs and I just don’t want to do that. Two was more than enough. That woman came in (2) and (4). She is endlessly fascinating to some people but thankfully she has fallen off my radar and I intend to keep it that way.

Yesterday I was missing gazing at stats, so since then I have been playing with Slimstat which is linked to Infosniper which is an IP lookup but shows you it on a map, and that is pretty cool. I’ve had so much fun. It’s one thing to see hits and unique visits, but quite another to see that visit on a map and imagine someone sitting in their home or in a cafe in Shanghai or Jakarta looking at my website on their phone. Wow! How amazing is that? So far all the bots and crawlers live in NYC. Why is that? It’s so exciting!

At one point though, I was looking at my stats, and I thought oooh, that looks like my IP address, is something hacking me? So, I rushed into my husband and asked him if he had checked out my homepage on my website for three seconds. He had. He roared with laughter and called me a stalker! Nice. I now understand what the little clock thing means on the interface and how that gets hit – if you reopen your browser and my site is open then I will get a little clock it’s not just a very short or long time the human may have just left the browser open and isn’t looking at all.

But back to my top blogs which were measured between April and October 2019, apart from Katie Hopkins and social anxiety, the other six blogs are about storytelling and making sense of the world, or data, or life experiences, or other people, which we do because we all want to feel better and we all want to feel heard (the conclusions I come to in every blog, it’s ultimately what motivates us):

This is blog number 200 and though I don’t write here all the time, when I do, I use it as a tool to manage my feelings and thoughts. Ah yes, I do it to feel heard and I do it to feel better. So, the fact that people stay and read and occasionally comment is just so lovely, all over the world too. Amazing. I am heard all over the world. That is magic. So, thank you to everyone who spends even three seconds on my site, it is lovely to think that my words may touch other people and that they come back to read more, even if when I write them I think that I am all alone.

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Sit. Feast on your blogs

My blogging tag cloud generated by wordclouds.com

I have had this blog 11 years now. It feels like a lifetime ago when I first installed WordPress complete with the Kubrick WordPress theme as a place just for me to come and figure out what I thought.

Recently, I discovered my Top Posts for all days ending … which sounds very dramatic and very satisfying, so thought I would look at my most popular top 11 posts of all time and remember how I wrote them. In order of most popular first, here goes:

1) Stalkers in space and Facebook in your face, (February, 2007)

I wrote this blog as I was fascinated by someone’s reaction to me googling them even though everyone else I knew had been online for years and so didn’t mind, but then that was from an era where we decided what to put online, nowadays because of genealogy websites and companies house there is a lot more information in the public domain about a person than they may even realise, anyone can find out anything. The Internet makes it super easy to become a Stalker!

But even now, this blog post gets read by someone everyday, and in the top ten search terms of all time there’s: facebook 1995, facebook, facebook screenshot, old facebook, early facebook screenshots, facebook webpage, facebook 2007

The other three terms are: ruth stalker firth, design pattern, IT security.

I love search terms. They are fascinating. So, I was saddened when Google decided to keep search terms private as I am a total nerd and love patterns (see 3) in statistics and words, which is why I find the above tag cloud completely beautiful. However, I do remember there was a lot Stalker search terms kept coming up and bringing them here.

And, people googling me helped me to decide to put up an About page as I hadn’t had one for a long time. I find About pages really interesting on other peoples’ websites so am thinking that people might want to know more about me. I added a Now page inspired by the NowNowNow initiative and I use it myself. It is like a to-do list.

2) User motivation: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, (December, 2007)

I remember being very pregnant writing this and I had been already given the news that there was a problem with my unborn child’s kidneys. So, I came here to think about Crannogs and holidays instead of googling renal fetal problems and driving myself mad with worry.

For me, technology is all about people, and humans are the central factor in any design project. Maslow’s hierarchy is a lovely way of organising things from social media (see 4) to chakras, though he only used two women in his sample of people but since women have rarely been written about, I am glad he used two. I can’t find anything better to organise our human experience which is to be felt, seen, heard. Soon I will write about Maslow’s hierarchy of technology.

3) Using patterns to shape our world, (March, 2007)

I’ve long been excited about patterns. In my PhD research I looked for patterns in my big data and graphical-user interfaces, which reminds me of the time my husband and I were in a restaurant arguing about whether object-oriented design was good for graphical-user interface design, the people on the next table asked to be reseated far away from us.

I have written quite a few blogs about finding the patterns in storytelling, in data (see 10), and in design. This was the very first blog I wrote about it and it thrills me to see that it gets read nearly as often as the social media blogs.

4) Maslow’s hierarchy of social media, (April, 2015)

I love thinking about social media, again what motivates people to share which is the need to be experienced. This is one of my favourite blogs as it was the first time I figured out what social media was about and how we use it. From this blog came the social animal on social media series which regularly gets hits because we like to know why we do what we do and social media is fascinating.

5) Chemotherapy: The year of my hair, (October 2012)

My hair was always my crowning glory and people would comment it on it all the time. It was big and black and beautiful, though for many years, out of a bottle. So, to be completely bald wasn’t much of a giggle even though it was only for four months. Sadly, though it never grew back in quite the same way, my hair is a lot less curly now. When I took off my wig and had a shorn head, people used to tell me that I was brave for getting a haircut that short. It felt really nice and furry and my baby girls would rub my head.

Brave was the term people used again when gave up the hair dye so I am not surprised that Fifty shades of my grey hair, (December 2016) came in no. 12 of all time even though it is relatively new. People like pictures to guide them through their own hair growth. I know I do. I still look at both sets of pictures to remember where I’ve been, because even now I want to dye my hair black and so remind myself how long it has taken to get where I am and how my dyed hair didn’t look very good anymore.

6) Cognitive Science for IT Security, (August, 2007)

This one was written for my students when I lectured at Westminster. It is one of my favourite subjects as it involves how we think and technology and how the two don’t always fit together too well. It was the saddest of days when I couldn’t lecture after my daughter was born, not least of all, because when I was ready to return the course had changed and this topic had disappeared because I had made it up and no one else had my unique skill set to teach it.

7) Why my coffee machine is so sexy, (February, 2007)

I have been in love with my coffee machine forever. My husband and I were newly married and were totally broke, and we spent a month’s rent money on this coffee machine which we ordered from a dodgy Italian website which didn’t say anything at all, so we didn’t know if they’d got the money, or if they really existed, or if we’d been ripped off. Ah, the joys of early international Internet shopping.

8) Bad design: Fresenius Applix Smart food pump, (December, 2008)

I took this one down as it attracted a lot of negativity. I talk about it here but I reread it again today and it is a good blog, a solid UX review, and there are comments by people who agree with me which I had forgotten about as I, like most humans, tend to remember the bad stuff more easily. What occurred to me today is that the blog is a demonstration of the medium is the message. People got so focused on the criticisms I had, that they thought I was criticising the purpose of the foodpump which I wasn’t. I thought about putting it back up but then thought again. I would never write another blog like it and I only want to spread positivity.

After this post, and apart from one about augmented and virtual realities and wearables, I didn’t blog again until 2011, and when I did it was about WordPress, this was when I had just finished chemotherapy and was about start radiotherapy and more surgery that I had the energy to think about things – seriously though, would I listen to myself? I had two small children to look after, one who was about to have another big surgery too. I hadn’t slept in years. However, it was important to me to think about technology and people, it’s what I do, it’s what I’ve always done, so I read all of Alan Dix’s TouchIT and took notes so that I could feel more like myself. I lost the notes before I got the chance to put them online, but the experience in itself kept me going, so thank you Alan, for sharing your book-to-be online, it kept me going.

In 2012 I managed to blog about embodiment during chemotherapy and the experience of my daughter’s first day at school, which was really nice. It brought me back to me and helped me remember how I like to write.

9) Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on (January, 2016)

This one is a pop psychology blog about why Katie Hopkins is so mean. It gets hits all the time and is always in my most popular this week. I have no idea why people want to read about her. I guess it is the same reason I needed to write about her. I just wanted to understand why someone would be that mean, which is probably why my blog on Prejudice: The social animal on social media (April 2016) comes in at no 13 on the all time blog hits.

10) Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data (April, 2016)

I was asked to lecture the module introduction to databases and the notes were a bit dry so I wrote this blog for my students to let them know that while we were linking together small tables of ten rows, people working with databases have millions and millions of rows to manipulate. Database design is exciting and patterns are where it is at.

11) Bikram: Heat is the way to inner peace March 2015

I love yoga. I started doing yoga when I was 14 years old, and am a trained teacher (of course I am, if there’s a formal way of learning anything, you can count on me to be your most enthusiastic student. Sign me up!). Bikram is just another wonderful variation of this wonderful gift. I love the heat, the sweat, and the way my body feels bending over lots of times in a hot room. I would recommend Bikram to anyone. It is a super hard discipline and never gets any easier, but I love it.

And, I love blogging. I love this space of mine. I write slowly and at great length. I used to have yoast installed which tells you how to make your blogs more SEO friendly, and says basically: 300 words long, H2 headers must have the keyword of the blog in them as the title must too, and you must sprinkle the keyword through the text. Yawn! I switched it off.

I take my time to write my blogs as I am not doing them to impress a search engine. I edit a lot, otherwise I end up with a blog like this one which as I reread it now, is a little disconnected and full of it’s brilliant, I love it. Pressing publish after grappling to understand something I didn’t before is just brilliant and yeah, I love it. I am so grateful to WordPress and Tim Berners-Lee for creating a platform for me to explore what’s on my heart, and for anyone who takes the time to read what I have written. Thank you.

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My top blogs 2017: Stories, statistics, and social media

Post-its patterns of my blogposts

I was talking to a Bikram friend today, who said that the first 20 minutes of the Bikram yoga sequence is us getting back in touch with ourselves and she has wondered for a while how to take that off the mat and into her life.

I love it when someone articulates clearly something that I have been pondering but didn’t know where to start. I know that connection to others is necessary, not least of all, because we learn about ourselves. But, in order to connect to others in a meaningful way, we first of all need to be able to connect to ourselves.

Each December, I like to reflect on what I have been blogging about all year. I did so in 2015 and 2016 and in this way I connect with myself, and my words, which makes it easier to connect to others and their words, especially with WordPress Reader.

And then, the stats themselves can tell a story. As I said in Top Blog No 3 (below), we are living in an age when we have lots of data and very little narrative, or insight, which is why everyone is nuts about big data as they think it will give them insight. But, to get the insight, you need to see patterns, and then make them into a story.

So, let’s take a look. My top 10 blogs of 2017 are:

  1. Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on
  2. Fifty shades of my grey hair
  3. Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data
  4. Maslow’s hierarchy of social media
  5. Aggression: The social animal on social media (6)
  6. Prejudice: The social animal on social media (7)
  7. User motivation: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
  8. Designing story (3): Archetypes and aesthetics
  9. Game theory in social media marketing (2): Customers and Competitors
  10. Alone together: Is social media changing us?

In all honesty, given the nature of 3.6 billion people online and how Google gets people to come to this site, the only real common thread in these blogs is that I wrote all of them. That said, I could make all manner of patterns out of these 10 posts because if there is one thing statisticians know: if you torture the data long enough it will tell you anything. But, what I really see in these top posts is that I have been blogging away about social media and storytelling for a few years now, and I have come full circle.

I started off with no. 10, actually my first social media blog was: Emerging Technologies: What’s the story? back in 2013, but when I wrote Alone together: Is social media changing us? I wasn’t sure about us learning about ourselves online, but now 60+ blogs later I think: Absolutely yes, it is true, we do come online to learn about ourselves, in the same way we learn about ourselves in conversation with others.

I found this out during the series The Social Animal on Social Media, and how stories matter. We interpret signs and symbols and make stories semiotically to make sense of the world and ourselves. We then tell them to others which creates an intimacy, and an energy which yes, causes a connection.

The constant theme running through all the blogs is connection and also understanding how to connect (which is why 4 and 9 have made it on, we like to make sense of our connections, 1, 5 and 6 are about making sense of bad behaviour or when connection goes sour). Now I only have two blogs left to write (one on social computing, and one on connection) and then I will have said everything and much more than I intended to, when I set out to talk about social media.

I am a year behind schedule as 2017 has been painful with some difficult life events, some heartbreak, and a lot of soul-searching, so to have felt a connection to others, more often than not online, throughout 2017, has been truly lovely. We do connect and have proper conversations on social media, contrary to what some sociologists might think.

I love blogging here. I make sense of the world and of myself, and as psychotherapist Matt Licata puts it, I satisfy that innate yearning for intimacy and aliveness.

So for that, and for the conversations, the connections, and for the laughter, especially the laughter, I am so very, very grateful, and I can’t wait to do it all again next year!

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Carpe diem: Travels without my phone

swimmingly

I had my phone snatched out of my hand on Monday morning as I was wandering along listening to some tunes and texting. To be absolutely fair, I have scalded my left hand (the hand I would normally text with) and it was mega cold, so I was holding the phone awkwardly in the wrong hand, numbly and higher than usual. Plus, I was completely distracted as I composed IMHO, a very funny text, the very thought of which was making me laugh out loud with my head thrown back. So, when a hand reached out and took the phone out of mine, I did not see that coming.

As my phone zoomed off the pavement and turned right at the traffic lights on the back of a moped in that very warm hand which had briefly touched mine, my first response was to phone someone to say I had been robbed. When, I realised I couldn’t, I felt its loss. And, for the following couple of days, anytime I reached for my phone, I was right back there in that moment, feeling the loss, like it was a new emotion, and feeling disconnected.

Here on this blog, I have written literally thousands of words thinking about social media, security and oversharing, being intimate online, being in the present moment or being elsewhere. I have even spent time offline and removed all my social media apps from my phone in order to see what difference it would make. Do I need to be online? Do I need to blog? Do I need to follow people?

Do I need social media?

The truth is no I don’t. I don’t need social media, I don’t need to respond to emails the minute they come in, I don’t even need to have a phone, the last couple of days have shown me that. I had no phone and nothing major happened and even if it had, people could have still reached me without a phone on my person. I would still show up if you asked me to, I don’t need a phone for that.

However, I love social media, I love email, I love having a phone because it augments me and the easiest way to augment a human is by connecting that human to another human who has the specific skill set that human needs. I am not in need of any skillset in particular, I just really enjoy walking about knowing that I can reach out to my favourite people with the touch of a button. I also really enjoy walking about listening to music, as if I have my own soundtrack to my life. Even the other day when I was seemingly inattentive to the moment in the street long enough to lose my phone, I was in an augmented moment on that street, in which life was enhanced and expanding – listening to music and laughing out loud whilst you chat to someone cool. What could be more present than that?

Little sips add up to a long cool drink of water

So, I disagree with Sherry Turkle more than ever when she says that social media is taking us to places we don’t want to go. I would disagree, it is reflecting us – all those cat pictures, and memes. All those lovely thoughts. We can also have proper conversations on Twitter, those little sips, as Turkle calls them, definitely add up to a long cool drink of water.

But, there is a lot of negativity online, you might say to me. And I wouldn’t disagree. It is, however, all a question of who you connect with, and how you want to spend your precious energy: Who refreshes you and who wears you out? It is the same question to ask yourself on or offline.  And, when you get caught out and have to spend time in a meaningless mean spirited interaction, whip out your phone and transport yourself elsewhere. Or if you are online, click away, don’t get poked or prodded if your needs are not being met.

We are apparently the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. Personally, I am an extremely lucky girl. So, if someone does come along again and take my phone off me, I will be ok, I am the average of some incredibly lovely people.

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Web design (2): Get the picture

Orlando-Web-Design

A collaborative medium, a place where we all meet and read and write.
– Tim Berners-Lee

[Part 2 of 7 : 0) intro, 1) story, 2) pictures,  3) users, 4) content, 5) structure, 6) social media, 7) evaluation]

The first picture ever uploaded onto the Internet was a photoshopped gif of a female comedy group at CERN called The Horrible Cernettes. Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the image to show that the Internet could be much more than physics laboratories sharing data worldwide.

The links above complain that it is a dreadful first image for making history, but I think that is in part because Berners-Lee wanted to make a point about what the Internet could be, so the content was the least of his worries. It wasn’t about the content. It was about the Internet being a place where we all meet. And, this is what is ultimately so liberating about our digital culture. We all get a say in what makes culture. And, perhaps physicists have different ideas about what is culturally important which, after all, is what makes The Big Bang Theory so brilliant and funny.

However, if we look at the ancient cave paintings found on the Island of Sulawesi, Indonesai, of hand prints and pig deer, we get a very different feeling. Archaeologists believe that they are at least 39,000 years ago and are among the oldest examples of figurative art, but cannot say for sure what they represent. They are beautiful and I look at them with awe, which is probably why some archaeologists speculate that they represent a belief system the artists held. Or perhaps, they are a world view, like the cave of swimmers, found in the Sahara. These paintings are only 8,000 years old, but have given rise to the theory that the Sahara was a place where people used to swim, before climate change turned it into a desert. We may never know.

I asked my girls what they thought the pictures of hands and beasts and swimmers meant. One said: This is me. Remember me. The other said: Spread my imagination. In other words, my girls think these images were drawn so that the artists could make their mark, record and share their worldview and be remembered, which I believe is why people create today whether it is images or words.

Science research website, Greater Good asked seven artists: Why do you make art? And they got the same response as the ones my junior school girls gave me with a couple of additions/variations:

Making art for fun and adventure; building bridges between themselves and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and memory; and saying things that they can’t express in any other way.

When they asked Hip-hop artist, KRS-One, he said:

Put a writing utensil in any kid’s hand at age two or three. They will not write on a paper like they’ll later be socialized to do, they will write on the walls. They’re just playing. That’s human. Graffiti reminds you of your humanity, when you scrawl your self-expression on the wall.

Which is so true. The ancient images were drawn on the wall. They are self-expression and remind us of our humanity, which is why they are so moving. Interestingly, hurried scrawled graffiti has been found on ancient monuments, and on the walls in Pompeii. And, in Rome on a church wall, the first words of Italian graffiti, or Vulgar Latin, were written, written like a response, in the vernacular, representing the ordinary person’s thoughts. Today, graffiti is shorthand for unsolicited markings on a private or public property and is usually considered to be vandalism. Yet, some of it is breathtaking and elaborate. There are three categories of graffiti: Tourist graffiti (‘John wuz here’), inner-city graffiti (tagging and street art), and toilet graffiti (latrinalia) described in a fabulous Atlantic article. Graffiti is a way of people contributing to the conversation like when people leave their comments and links below.

As is painting, so is poetry

The Roman poet Horace ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry) made the link between word and image, which has kept the art world busy for centuries. Aristotle’s theory of drama considered the balance of lexis (speech) and opsis (spectacle) in tragedy. So we can see that ancient theories of memory use words and images, which no doubt inspired the more modern and controversial Dual Coding Theory, which says that when someone is learning a new word, if a meaningful picture is given alongside it, the learner will retain it more easily than if it didn’t have an accompanying picture. This is reminiscent of the ubiquitous meme: lovely quotation, lovely image, shared experience, which has a gestalt feel of something meaningful.

Hieroglyphics

The first written language was a language of images –  the Hieroglyphics. However, the appreciation of their meaning was lost until the decoding of The Rosetta Stone which took so long because the code breakers they thought they were decoding images. It was only when they realised that the Hieroglyphics were a language and needed to be treated as such, did they decode the stone.

Like all languages, Hieroglyphics are an organised form of communication because you can’t build something as grand as the Pyramids without communicating clearly and communication is a way of advancing humanity. However, Hieroglyphics began as decorative symbols for priests – a gift of sacred signs given from the God Thoth – and were used to record the meaning of life and religion and magic. These were too elaborate for merchants, who adopted a simpler version to preserve their transactions, until Hieroglyphics fell out of favour for the more practical cursive Coptic script, which gave way to Arabic and Latin, languages we recognise today, in which communication was preserved and recorded to enrich future generations.

Images reward us

Research, particularly in the field of neuroesthetics, which is how the visual brain appreciates visual art, shows us that art is a rewarding experience. It is not necessarily the message itself which the viewer finds rewarding, it is how it is delivered. That is to say, it is it is not what is painted, it is how it is painted that lights up the brain’s reward centre. And, we prefer images to photographs, because the brain is free to interpret meaning even though it ultimately prefers to see a representation of what is in nature. And why wouldn’t it?

The asethetics of nature

In nature we find so many pleasing patterns. We also are attracted to art and people who are asethetically pleasing. The golden ratio is a pattern which appears in nature and has been used in art, as has symmetry. The most beautiful people have symmetrical faces and the most average facial features. We are naturally attracted to beautiful people in paintings and real life.

And, we are also influenced by them, which marketers have long recognised. They use lovely images to wrap their products in knowing that us consumers will be more willing to consume something which looks beautiful. This is known as the art infusion effect.

It is the same for newspapers, pictures sell more copy. The Illustrated London News was created in 1842 and had 60,000 subscribers in that year alone, after someone realised that newspapers sold more copies when they had pictures in them, especially ones which showed a face or place. But it wasn’t until 1889 that photographs were used in newspapers.

Images online

And so it is online, Jakob Nielsen says that users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but will ignore pictures used to jazz up web pages. Stock pictures of people in business situations get ignored but pictures of people who write the blogs or work in the companies get studied 10% longer than their written biographies which often accompany any photograph. If you are selling a product you need high quality photographs which users can inspect and compare.

Users want to be educated by the images and find out things which is ultimately why they are on your website. Edward Tufte has written extensively about excellence in statistical graphics and visualising data. His says that users are sophisticated individuals so:

Give them the greatest number of ideas, in the shortest time, with the least ink, in the smallest space.

There is no need to dumb down. When a graphic is well created, patterns can be seen and understood on different levels.

In a great talk for An Event Apart, Designer and Developer Advocate at Mozilla, Jen Simmons looks offline at magazines for inspiration and remembers how there was much experimentation and creativity online until everyone adopted grids and fell into a rut. She also outlines ways of using responsive images, for leaner, faster pics, and highlights new cool and practical uses of imagery with the latest tags from W3C.

Images are communications which have the power to change us. Here are some:

Content aside, the urls are precisely named to drive traffic via social media.

However, if all else fails, talk to your user and learn all about what they are looking for, before you share your beautiful art.

[Part 3:Web design: Getting to grips with your user’s experience]