User Engagement!
User engagement measures whether users find value in a product or service and refers to how frequently and how long a user interacts with your website, app, or other product. It can be measured by a variety or combination of activities such as downloads, clicks, shares, and more. Highly engaged users can be more profitable for your business in the long run. In this article, I will try to explain a little bit about user engagement and how my team and I implement it in our project.
Why is user engagement important?
User engagement highly correlates with how your product performs in terms of profitability. There is a high chance that most customers that use your product only use once especially if your product offers a free trial. When you make signing up a lot easier, what you get is lots of signups but it does not guarantee that the user that sign-ups use your product, and unfortunately, lots of signups don’t translate to lots of customers. Customers are the result of a series of events. Here is a simple overview:
User attention is a finite resource and if users choose to spend their time on a particular app or site, they’re signaling that they find value in it. This allows businesses to make money from the product or service with ads, subscriptions, or sales. Highly engaged users are more likely to share, buy, and return to the product.
Measuring User Engagement
Now that you know what user engagement is, it is important to know how to measure User Engagement, as using the wrong measuring method can cost your profitability and mess up analyzing your products. To know how to measure your user engagement you need to know what user engagement means for your product. Here are some examples:
- Media site: Views, Times on page, shares, likes, comments
- Music Streaming App: Listening time, downloads, daily usage, playlists
- E-commerce: Monthly spending, Daily usage, wishlist, shopping cart
- Finance app: Monthly usage, dashboard, transactions, savings
There are more types of user engagement that you can track or measure for example new and returning visitors, conversions (goals you set up to track and assign value to), and others.
User Engagement For my Project
Now that you know how important user engagement is I will try to explain a little bit about how user engagement works on my project. My project is called BuildFocus and I work on it with 4 other teammates. We work on the project to finish our Software Engineering Project course. Our stakeholder is PT. Gotong Royong Bangun Bangsa a startup based in Indonesia. Here are how we keep the user engaged:
- A strong first impression: Onboarding pages
Above is BuildFocus’s onboarding page that explains how the app works and what purpose that the app serves in a simple design and easy to learn explanations. And not all information is displayed upfront to keep the user engaged.
2. Feature Improvement
The only time your users care about new product features or improvements is when they’re using your product, so that’s exactly where you should be announcing them. Keeping features updated based on user’s feedback and needs and the current trend are important so users will keep using your product. We keep the design updated based on how it will look but stay true to the original design as to not diverge from the theme that are set.
3. Important Metrics
As stated above, metrics are an important part of user engagement. Here are some important metrics for our project:
- Daily active users (DAUs)
- Ads Watched
- Average visit time
- The average revenue per user (ARPUs)
- Hearts Donated
There are many other important metrics for our project but above are just a few examples. These metrics can be factored into how we update the product for example which feature needed an upgrade and which feature are used the most.
Our project is in the early stages which we still determining what kind of metrics we should use and what other features or perks that we can add to keep the user engaged.
That’s all from me thank you for reading!
