What is the Availability Heuristic and how you can make it work for you
The Availability Heuristic is a tendency for human beings to act on the information that's most readily available to them when making quick decisions
Most readily available in this case means ubiquitous or most recently stored information and explains why people have a distorted view of the prevelence of certain newsworthy events; child abduction, plane crashes, gun crime, to name but a few.
Most readily available, also means easiest to process, the human brain has acquired a facility for processing images over text which has contributed to its ability to survive.
Add to this the tiny, tiny attention span of the average website visitor and your need to give them something that will grab their attention in less than ten seconds
Images will do that
Accessability of images
Not only does that attention-deficient website visitor prefer the speed of information offered by an image, they're also much faster at processing images than text, AND they find them easier to remember thanks to the multitudinous ways image memories are stored in our brains.
To find out how this combination of the Availability Heuristic and high quality images can do the work of holding, and keeping your website visiters, read more here...