Cloudinary

Static Images Are Losing the Engagement Battle

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.

Responsive Images in HTML

A single <img src="hero.jpg"> used to be the only option. It still works — but it means serving a 2400px image to a device with a 375px screen, and serving that same image as a JPEG to a browser that would have accepted AVIF at a third of the file size. The browser has had the primitives to do better than this for years. Most sites don’t use them correctly.