What to Focus on When Improving User Engagement?
How to fix the well, not the sink
Products with lower engagement and / or retention than expected often require an outside analysis on what to tweak in order to increase said metrics and that’s essentially what I do here in NYC.
Understand the product
I have seen consultants coming up with solutions that are changing the core concept of the app in order to promote engagement. I have heard people going as far as suggesting an educational app should focus on teaching other subjects in order to gain more users.
It’s often a struggle to find the line between giving advice on the business model and changing the concept of the business but I can’t imagine the scenario where the latter is the only option in order to improve engagement.
Realize the scope
Every change in an application is a jump in the development cost. My job is to make sure the potential increase in engagement is in correlation with the cost of developing the solution
My current project is a great example of the topic. It’s an education platform meant for 6–8 year olds to learn life skills through interacting with animal videos.
The app prompts users different questions during a short film about a specific animal. After finishing all of the 6 available films the retention drops because there’s no unexplored content left.
If the app would have 60 videos instead of 6 it would definitely have longer retention but the proposed solution cannot be to “create more content.”
I’m definitely not going to be the guy who suggests to create couple of dozen 25 000$ videos to improve retention.
If you want a sustainable heat source you don’t keep throwing more lumber into the fireplace. You buy a heater.
However the content in this case is not restrained by only the amount of videos — it can also be described by the amount of activities within a video. Perhaps the issue is not the amount of content but the amount of variety within that content.
Creating new quizzes or different types of challenges that apply to a video is cheaper and yields a higher ROI even if the increase in retention is smaller.
Know your audience
Another aspect I noticed was that onboarding was almost nonexistent and when opening the application I was lost without any indication on what to do next. My 3 Phases of an Engaging Application and 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Gamification explain why I believe those aspects to be huge problem.
The most basic approach would be to start working on a proper onboarding which explains the application and immerses the user into the app.
Applying an onboarding solution where the user is guided through different features of the app might instead lower the engagement when not considering the audience — 6 year old children need action instead of explanation.
Instead of learning how useful this app is for their education, they just want to shake the Ipad to give a giraffe some carrots.
Another major question here is who the onboarding is aimed towards? Is it for the parent who decides which apps to download for her child or do we need to communicate with a child who is downloading his own apps?
I believe that the variety and depth of analyzing user engagement is the main reason behind why I find it so intriguing. There are many different solutions on improving engagement and retention but unless you go the extra mile of understanding the product you are fixing the solution is a hit or miss.
If you found this article interesting and wish to stay in the loop about how well are companies using User Engagement Design, don’t forget to recommend this article and follow my blog
For more on User Engagement Design read my other posts
My articles on “Analyzing Gamified Solutions”:
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — DueProps
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Classcraft
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Memrise
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Habitica
- Analysing Gamified Solutions — Google Local Guides
