How do you grab and keep your reader’s attention?

A writer's best option may be visual content.

There are so many resources of information today. Who has time to read every work-related document or every article shared on Twitter or Facebook? As information overload grows, it is increasingly difficult to grab and keep a reader’s attention.

In fact, the latest research indicates that you only have 8 seconds to grab a reader’s attention and only 5 minutes to hold it. Those times are down by 50 percent in 10 years. People shift attention 21 times per hour. How can you compete with the growing deluge of emails, chats and texts? As distractions increase, it has become overwhelmingly apparent that technical writers can no longer provide lengthy, continuous written content.

Traditionally, written text has been the best way to present ideas. But, now written text seems to be getting in the way of communicating a message. A massive wall of endless text will only cause readers to abandon your content. Our audience now requires interactive guides that condense text to enhance the reader’s experience.

It is easy to play it safe with our documentation strategies and continue doing things the way we’ve always done them because that’s what we know and it satisfies a checkbox where product documentation is required in a project plan. But, the technical documentation landscape is ever-changing and ever-evolving. New methods and approaches to providing product content are emerging all the time.

There is evidence that utilizing visual content closes the gap between what you want your reader to understand and what they actually retain. After all, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual and the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

I'm always looking for new methods to present information in user documentation. I’m constantly refining my process as a writer and striving to articulate technical content in more engaging ways, like for example, by utilizing visualizations. I read on lifelearnplatform.com that if a relevant image is paired with information, people retain 65 percent of the information three days later as opposed to retaining only 10 percent of the information when presented without an image. I strive to create quality user documentation that provides clear guidance, solves users' problems and overall improves productivity.

To prove the point, I created an infographic detailing the content of this article and posted it as an image on LinkedIn. (Unfortunately, LinkedIn does not allow you to embed images within articles.) In a 24 hour period, the infographic was viewed 85 times compared to this article containing the same content which only received 7 views in the same time period.

I will continue to challenge myself by learning new techniques to present content in ways that best inform and engage my readers.

What strategies are you employing to keep up with the pace?