User Engagement talks

User engagement describes how much, how often and how deeply people interact with a product. It is more than time spent: an engaged user finds the product worth returning to, makes progress with it and often feels some emotional connection to it.

In UI, UX and product design, engagement is where usability meets motivation. Feedback, clear goals, a sense of mastery, social connection and moments of delight all play a part. Game mechanics and gamification are common tools, though engagement tends to last longer when it serves people’s own goals rather than a metric.

The seven talks here run from 2009 to 2015. Amy Jo Kim covers “Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software” and Gabe Zichermann “Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification”, both at Google Tech Talks. Nadya Direkova presents “16 Design Patterns for User Engagement” at GSummit in 2012, Jesse James Garrett talks about “Design for Engagement” at UX Salon and Kelly Goto about “Beyond Usable: Mapping Emotion to Experience” at UX Lisbon (both 2014). Kathy Sierra gives “Making Badass Developers”, and David Carson speaks on “Design, discovery and humor” at TED Talks. The UI-Patterns.com library includes many persuasive patterns used to design for engagement.