The Need for Speed

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tags: usability

Some years ago — back in the day when the internet only came in dialup and we all walked barefoot to school — I wrote a piece about images and the user experience.

The online journal Kairos published it.

Though many of us now have broadband connections — there is still some good thinking in here about when, and why, to use images online.

The 10,000-word question: Using images on the world-wide web

• Wait of the web
• Speed, the web’s most important design criterion
• Images enhance recall
• Illustration and redundancy
• Save pictures for punch
• Image do’s
  • Crop to reduce image size
  • Write to provide context for images
  • Think twice about using pictures of text
• A plea for power