6.5.6 User engagement measures

What this heading covers

Engagement is the family most easily measured badly. A count of sessions is not engagement unless it is related to the population and the task. The measure should say what counts as engaged: a completed task, a return within a period, a sustained use over time. It should also say what the product is for, because a tool used once a quarter can be highly engaging and a daily app can be a chore. The draft places it under interaction capability, so the measure is about the interaction, not about marketing reach.

Record position: family 13 of 40 in clause 6, under 6.5 Interaction capability, which carries 8 families. It is one of the 40 families a programme has to map its measures to, and its elements are listed below. The heading is 6.5.6 in the public contents; the text behind it is not public.

How a measure for this family is built

Take the number of users who meet the engagement definition in the period as the numerator over the users exposed to the product in the same period. State the period and the definition. If depth matters, add a second measure such as tasks completed per active user, and keep the two apart.

What to put in place before publication

1. Define engaged before looking at the data.
2. Keep reach and engagement as separate measures.

Evidence to keep

Two questions to ask

• What counts as engaged, over what period, for which exposed population?
• Is reach reported separately from engagement?

Where teams usually fall short

• A sessions-per-user figure with no definition of a session and no exposed population.

What the number cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether engagement was good for the user. A product can engage people in a task that wastes their time.

What happens next

User assistance is the family that can lift engagement, and self-descriptiveness is what makes it work without help.