Infrastructure | Alexis Hope

Static Images Are Losing the Engagement Battle

August 24, 2021

#Cloudinary #DAM #UX #Ecommerce #Media #Image

There is a measurable cost to serving static images. Not a performance cost — that’s a different conversation, one I covered in an earlier post on Cloudinary as a DAM. This is an engagement cost: the gap between what a user feels when they interact with a product image and what they feel when they look at one.

A 2017 paper in Computers in Human Behavior quantified this gap directly. Blazquez Cano et al. ran a controlled experiment with 218 participants browsing fashion clothing on an iPad — split across three conditions: static images, 360° visual rotation, and tactile simulation (a scrunch gesture that deformed the fabric texture on screen). The engagement scores across dimensions like novelty, felt involvement, and endurability were significantly higher in both interactive conditions than in the control group. The static image condition scored 1.34 out of 7 for novelty — participants essentially disagreed that they felt any curiosity or interest. The interactive conditions scored 4.63 and 4.95 on the same measure. The paper is readable in full here.

Percona Toolkit for Managing MySQL Clusters

March 19, 2018

#MySQL #Percona #Database #Replication #Infrastructure

Running a MySQL cluster in production eventually teaches you that MySQL’s built-in tooling is optimised for the happy path. Replication works, until it doesn’t. Schema changes are fast, until the table has 80 million rows. SHOW SLAVE STATUS reports lag, but the number isn’t always telling you the truth.

Percona Toolkit is a collection of command-line tools that covers exactly these gaps — the operational situations where the native toolset leaves you guessing. I’ve been running MySQL replication clusters for long enough to have a working set of tools I reach for reflexively. These are the ones that have earned a permanent place in that set.