[nickjj]

Question:

When reading programming tutorials or a write up about a tech concept do you prefer if the article has a hero image or not? This would be an image loaded at the top which sums up the title of the post visually.

On a related note, personally if someone has 500 blog posts I'd like to see them in a condensed bullet list so I can scan the titles super fast. I don't want to see images and have 10 loaded per page. It turns something from a 2 minute effortless quick scan to dozens of clicks and potentially 20 minutes.

However, in practice having images for each post seems to get more engagement (ie. people clicking things and beginning to read your article). I never understood why in the context of programming. I understand pictures are useful for hardware or if you need to make a diagram. I'm mainly talking about the hero image here.

[stargrazer]

Is the engagement lead to extended time engagement, or is just click engagement? I remember, I think it was intuit, their knowledge base was a matrix of pictures with very little text. That obtained no engagement from me as I was unwilling to click into each every picture to see if it was relevant or not. I guess their click rate goes up, but their duration engagement goes down.

[shostack]

Technical marketer here.

I hate fluff. I can spot it a mile away. If you have a hero image that adds no value then don't use it. If it has a related screenshot with interesting or useful information in it (like a code snippet and resulting output that the tutorial covers), that might be useful.

Otherwise just... don't.