How does video enhance the user experience on a website?

All of the internet, no matter what site you’re on, you’re most likely to find a video somewhere on that page, but why is that?

First of all, videos are more entertaining than reading a long piece of writing, and as human beings, we like to be entertained - otherwise why would cinemas, concerts, or games exist? If a website has a short video, or two, explaining what the site is about, more people are statistically likely to look around the website more, simply to watch the videos, and through this, they will take more of the information in - this is why a lot of revision websites also include videos within their sites. Furthermore, it’s much easier to sit, waiting for the video to play, and it takes a lot less effort than what reading does.

Also, it’s a lot easy to show what you want to show, and create the right moods within a video than it is within writing. Sure, there’s emotive writing, but it’s videos that affect the majority, not writing. A video within a website, particularly an informational website, is sure to catch attention and create the exact mood it wants through the images. If the video is hard hitting, it’s also much harder to turn it off, unlike if you just want to stop reading, much like a train-crash - you don’t want to look, but you can’t look away from a video. Video is the medium to tell stories with, so why shouldn’t websites use video to help explain what the site is about?

Additionally, movement naturally attracts the human eye. Although this may not be true for animated adverts, it is for animated content, such as videos. This is because videos on a website are there to help us reach our goal, unlike adverts, which seem to be there to distract us from what we’re doing. The human brain is a complex thing, reacting differently to similar things, but if the brain realises that the animation is helping us solve something, it becomes very responsive to movement.

Video is so important on a website, because it does enhance a user’s experience by bringing knowledge in an entertaining way, that is still very simplistic, but yet creative. Voice over agencies such as Matinée Multilingual work to adapt video content into other languages to fit target audiences, through either recording a voiceover track or adding subtitles, and translating captions within the video, in order to stop language barriers from blocking the enhancement that users can experience.