Measuring user engagement
This is part 2 in a series of articles about measuring Key Experience Indicators (KEIs). In this series I go deeper into the Google HEART framework for large-scale data analysis. The framework was put in place to help choose and define appropriate metrics that reflect both the quality of user experience and the goals of your product. Each article in the series discusses one of the HEART dimensions — Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task success. Enjoy and use it!
What is engagement?
In the context of products and services, engagement is the level of user involvement with a product. The term normally refers to the frequency, intensity, or depth of interaction between user and product, feature, or service over a given period of time. User engagement is an unbiased behavioral measurement and is therefore trustworthy, valid, and reliable.
Why measure engagement?
Understanding people’s engagement behavior toward a thing (feature, service, process, etc.) is revealing how much that thing is meeting a true human need and how much people are hooked into using it. Different engagement metrics can reveal not just frequency of usage, but also depth and volume of usage that can be more indicative of great value, product, and user experience.
