Building a Hotel Website for Visual Learners
The Internet is used to learn. Guests browse to learn more about their hotel options before booking a room. The obvious step for the hotelier, then, is to design a website that can be easily understood by more people. This begs the question: how do most people learn?
There are three main types of people; visual learners, auditory learners and kinesthetic (tactile) learners. Visual learners understand the world around them through pictures and space. They tend to be more creative and find unconventional solutions to problems. Auditory learners understand the world through sound and words. They tend to perform well on tests, are very organized and excel in linear problem solving. Kinesthetic learners understand the world around them by experience. They learn by doing, and have a harder time with instruction.
Sixty percent of people are visual learners. The average website has a lot of text. Text is great and is very important for ranking well in search engines (for search engines only read text) but of the three types of people, only one (auditory) learns best by reading pure text—and even then they respond better to spoken words than written words (and are only 10 percent of the population).
The solution for the hotelier is clear: build a website with lots of images so that visual learners can learn by seeing, and build a website with great information architecture, so kinesthetic learners can learn by browsing. Having a text-only website is a poor browsing experience, because most guests will see the wall of text as a barrier and walk away with a muddled idea of what your hotel is really like. With big, high-resolution, landscape photographs, visual learners will see what your hotel is like and be compelled to stay there.
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