Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash

I hear one word more than any others in my day-to-day gamification work: engagement. It usually pops up when I ask the question:

“So, why are you interested in using gamification in your product?”

Almost always comes the response:

“We need more engagement.”

But it’s my next question that causes people to struggle to put words together.

“Why?”

So many sources out there, talks, articles, interviews, podcast, emphasize how important it is to capture attention and control engagement in such a way that everyone seems to always be looking for more, more, more without asking themselves why or what engagement really means to them — or to their product or service.

Let’s take a journey into what engagement really is, the role it should (and shouldn’t) play in our design journey, and reflect a little on why we are so focused on getting quantity over quality.

Demystifying Engagement

In the design world, we tend to define engagement in relation to the amount of involvement, interactions, and focus users have with our product. Engagement happens when we get people’s attention and keep it focused on what’s happening in the experience in front of them.

For a more detailed look, let’s use the 3-E Model to look at engagement. Scott Gould explains in this interview three different dimensions of engagement:

1. Engagement as Expression: When the person is mentally focused and gives the product their attention.
2. Engagement as Encounter: When the person is physically taking action and experiences the product.
3. Engagement as Empowerment: When the person emotionally aligns with the product.

This being said, engagement is not simply capturing a single interaction, but capturing a series of meaningful, purposeful interactions. It’s the meaning and purpose behind the interactions that is engagement, not simply the act itself. This is why it’s much easier to capture expression, than it is to capture encounter or empowerment.

So we should ask ourselves why would someone give us their focus, take action, and, in the best case, align with what we’re doing? In short, this happens when the user feels they are getting value from the product.

Value can be many things. It can be defined by things that come from inside ourselves (intrinsic motivation) or from external sources (extrinsic motivation). It can be for handling day-to-day responsibilities, or entertainment. There are many ways to provide value, but it’s unlikely we will give our focus, energy and attention unless we perceive something good to come from it — because we have a limited amount of that to give a day.

We can believe we are providing value, but engagement will only occur if the user perceives and agrees with us that that value is generated from their interactions. The more our product’s output/experience aligns with their personal drivers and values the more they will connect and identify with us — thus be more engaged.

Non-Stop Engagement?

We have a limited ability to focus at one point in time. We only have so much capacity to focus until we need a break. Overall research shows we have about 4 to 5 hours of focus a day and we can focus in a row for about 90 minutes at a time maximum before needing at least a 15-minute break. This limitation requires people to be selective with their focus, and only spend it on things that they perceive to bring them value and enjoyment.

Yes, we can get into states of Flow, a mental state where a person is full immersed in an activity with high levels of concentration and enjoyment. However, even flow states can only last a few hours before we need a break. It’s just not possible, and especially not healthy, for us to stay “on” all the time.

With this in mind, as designers, we need to be responsible and empathetic in the way we design products to try and capture (or demand) part of people’s attention. We should not design for maximum engagement, all day every day. Not only is that not really ethical, if your app or experience is demanding constant unnecessary attention, but it’s also likely going to be the thing that people delete or ignore — even if it does — at moments — provide value.

Most products, if not almost all of them, don’t have a real reason to be used constantly, and it’s rarely a good design approach (or a moral one) to build in features purely to create the constant need.

This is why, for both ethical and practical reasons, designing blindly for maximum engagement is a horrible approach. Poorly-designed KPIs can end up creating more problems.

Focus on What Really Matters

As designers, our north star metrics should always be focused on measuring engagement related to the value we (want to) provide. When we’re able to identify the real moments that our product provides value, and focus on engaging people in those moments, we’ll be designing healthier, more engaging projects.

Keep in mind some of the most engaging products at the moment, Wordle or BeReal, are focused on quality, not quantity of content and interactions.

Therefore, when you’re thinking about engagement, ask yourself: What are the natural triggers in someone’s life to think to use your product? What are they really looking for in that moment? What don’t they understand in that moment? What is a barrier in their way to accessing the system? What would they consider to be the real moments of value? How often do those moments truly happen in a person’s life?

Becoming obsessed with designing your product to arbitrarily, and unnecessarily, encourage daily use is, again, unethical, but it also increases the risk of your product failing in the market. If you aren’t getting enough signups, instead of trying to add layers of unrelated features or content to increase engagement, go back instead to the problem you’re looking to solve and making sure the market is big enough or your value proposition is clear enough.

Same goes for if you’re not getting engagement — don’t try and add more ways for people to engage, go back to the root and try and figure out why people aren’t engaging with the value you feel you’re providing.

Gamification is best used to make systems more accessible. It’s useful in helping people understand how systems work — what’s possible, what’s rewarded, what’s penalized, etc. It’s not there to obscure what’s really going on, or add unrelated features to trick people into engaging more.

And finally, as a last reminder, remember that just because you design a platform that gets people to interact, doesn’t mean they’re actively engaging or internalizing. This is also why you should also be wary of adding too many unrelated, extrinsic rewards to boost engagement.

A download of a pdf, or a bookmark of your article, doesn’t mean that the person has read that content, enjoyed that content, or learned anything from that content. They simply interacted with it. So even though on the surface it sounds great — they didn’t really engage with them, and therefore, are unlikely to actually follow through with any deeper levels of engagement.

So challenge yourself to go deeper, when you find yourself wanting engagement. Make sure you can be specific about your why, and know the value (what) you want to provide. Try and aim for quality over quantity — you might just be surprised how much the engagement in your product actually improves.