The term “User Engagement” has been bandied around the IT industry for decades now. To my knowledge the only other industry that refers to its customers as “Users” is the illegal drug industry. There are some similarities. The users are demanding, can’t get enough of what they want, pay too much and inevitably end up disappointed.

Jokes aside, however, when it comes to systems designed to facilitate collaboration, like Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) software, it leads to confusion as to what “user engagement” really means. IT heritage thinking would have it mean “how the user engages with the IT system”. Its all about how users enter something into a system and get something back out in return. So when it comes to measuring and monitoring how successful an IT system is, it invariably comes down to usage. How much was the system exercised? How available was it? Did the user get out of it what they wanted?

When we talk about collaboration and collaboration systems, our heritage IT thinking kicks in and we want to measure how many people are using the system as the key measure of success. So we start to measure User Engagement in terms of system utilization. But what about how users engage with each other? Isn’t that what collaboration is all about? Isn’t that the real ultimate measure of user engagement? It’s not that system utilization is irrelevant, its not. But if the focus is on the system utilization we could lose sight of what the real objective is. Think of it like a dating site that measures its success by how many people they sign up or how many profile searches are made, rather than measuring themselves through the true measure of successful matches. It’s unlikely that such a site would have a very long life.

At SWOOP we focus on relationship centered metrics. We believe that user engagement should be about how people engage with other people in collaborative activities. As part of our ESN comparative analytics framework, we include the following “User Engagement” measures: 

We suspect that the above measures might be quite foreign to those used to the traditional systems utilization measures. But just like the dating site, until we start to measure success in human terms, rather than system activity measures, our users will continue to pay too much and still end up disappointed.