Interview with course designer Bob Horn | What's in the course? | How do I bring the course into my company? | Effectiveness of visual language | Details about course | Please contact me | MacroVU home page | Send us a message

Many people intuitively see that visual language--increasing the ratio of visual elements to words and tightly integrating them--will create more effective and efficient communication, learning, and problem solving. And that also is what researchers have found. For example, in experiments comparing visual presentations and purely verbal presentations, researchers at the Wharton School of Business found a variety of important positive effects of visual language. Here are their five results:

One of the things that business people specially like about visual language is its ability to communicate efficiently. That translates into shorter meetings:

They found that the visual language group came to consensus quicker:

They found that the presenters using visual language were considered more persuasive:

And, in general, the presenters using visual language made a better impression:

Then there is a whole series of studies done by John Sweller and his colleagues in Australia. Here are the results of two of the studies:

Sweller and his colleagues in a series of experiments found higher learning. Here is a sample of their data:

These results are typical of recent studies comparing how fast and accurately high school students and industrial workers understood a visual language version of documents (in which the text and diagrams were tightly integrated) as opposed to conventional texts (in which the diagrams were separate from the text). In other similar experiments, John Sweller and his colleagues found from 10 to 150% greater speed in understanding of visual language documents and from 20 to 50% fewer errors (or better learning scores).