User engagement- can it be identified and measured?
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends”- Walt Disney
In today’s world, users have a greater reliance on technology and as a result their expectations are increased. With the internet being an online platform to express one’s self, our users are not only expecting higher levels of customer service but are becoming quite vocal when their expectations are exceeded or not met.
User Experience Design is about engagement. It’s not about a specific product or service or app or website. It’s about what happens before, during and after the interactions with these things.
I think user engagement is on everyone’s mind. It is that quality of User Experience that emphasizes the positive aspects on an interaction- the fact of being captivated by the technology.
Ultimately this is about human engagement. What happens after they experience the product or service?
· What do they do?
· What do they feel?
· What do they tell others?
Before we try to understand the nuances of User engagement, let’s go through some critical principles of design first-
Principles of design
Visibility of system status- The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
Recognition rather than recall
Minimise the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Discoverability — is it possible to determine what actions are possible?
Feedback — there is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service
Affordances — Affordances are the cues that tell a user how to interact with a site or application. Proper affordances make it easy for a user to discover, understand and interact with the site or application.
Constraints — providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guiding actions and making interpretations easy
User control and freedom- Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed.
Great companies like Apple imagine this engagement and then create the technologies to leverage these experiences. Not the other way around. And this all comes down to knowing who you are designing for, psychology, experiences, interactions, details.
How can we identify User Engagement? There is a long list of characteristics but here are a few
Focused attention: users must be focused to stay engaged.
Have you ever seen a 9 yr old boy play Minecraft? The attention they give to the game is captivating (possibly infuriating to parents)
Novelty: Appeal to user’s curiosity
Dating apps- Has anyone played with Tinder recently?!
Involvement: Presence of the user
Duolingo, Babel or any good language learning app qualifies here
Intimacy: Affection or aversion of the user to an experience
Spotify, Uber
Influence: Likelihood of user advocacy
Any social media platform like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
Measuring User Engagement is complex. Many studies have been conducted to identify the standards like self-reported engagement, interaction engagement, cognitive engagement and ways to measure it- eye tracking, analytics- click-through rate, time spent comments posted, interviews and questionnaires and more.
Measurement of User Engagement can be triggered through various ways- decline in page views, falling purchases of an app, unfavourable comments, rise in competitor sales to name a few.
And more often than not, companies take a reactive approach to fix it. Quick fixes are what they are- quick and a fix. That cannot sustain in the long run.
Instead, a proactive approach and investing time and resources to understand our users will take us far.
“In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive edge is the knowledge and engagement with customers”- Forrester Research
It all comes down to connecting the 3 vital things - User feelings (e.g. bored, excited, happy, sad) User mental states (e.g. lost, involved, concentrated) and User interactions (e.g. click, buy, comment)
A quote from a talk hosted by Mixpanel, the analytics platform sums it up nicely- “There is a ton of offline behaviour before the user comes to the site or app to shop. It’s not about building an experience where people sign up and click a few buttons. It’s about understanding the emotions behind the user’s actions.”
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work your way backward to the technology- not the other way around”- Steve Jobs
Successful technologies are not just used, they are engaged with.