Images and user engagement

"Can images improve user engagement?"

I really enjoy answering those seemingly simple questions. I usually learn something new in attempting to answer them.

There’s a general agreement (among marketers) that images improve engagement with social media content. One study I found shows that even just the presence of an image increases engagement – though the authors also note that higher quality, relevant imagery gets a greater engagement. A review also mentions a couple of studies which showed that social media posts including imagery gained greater engagement than those not using imagery.

"But what about images on our website?"

I work for a public organisation, providing a service which isn't available anywhere else. As such, I use the gov.uk design system to make content decisions. They advise that we should: 

“Avoid unnecessary decoration. Only use images if there’s a real user need.”

For most of our web content I’m tempted to agree in this instance. People come to us because they want to perform a process they can’t do anywhere else. In most cases, imagery will not help users to complete these tasks.

When images are useful

I used to work for a charity. We did use imagery on every page to improve engagement with our website. We wanted people to support us – they had to choose to interact with us. Images were much more important in telling the charity’s story and getting people to choose to donate to us rather than another charity.

"What does NHS Digital say about images?"

Alternatively, NHS Digital encourages the use of photography. They have a great page detailing how an NHS provider can use photography effectively on their own digital channels. NHS Digital suggests that we should use photos of “real” people (ie avoid anything which looks like stock imagery). 

And interestingly, they also suggest that we should be keeping multiple versions of subjects, using different crops or focal points – this would allow us to use images in components which require different crops (shown below).

Screen shot from the NHS Digital website showing how different framing and cropping can be used for the same subject to allow different components to be built.

Final thoughts

Images do help users to engage with social media content. We can assume that webpages containing high-quality images will come across as more engaging and trustworthy too. However, I don’t think we should put images on every page on our website. Most pages are transactional, the user just wants to do something on them.