The dangers of ‘Engagement’ as an untethered KPI

Set your design goals for quality, not quantity.

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…