User engagement: the network effect matters!

In the online world, user engagement refers to the quality of the user experience that emphasizes the positive aspects of the interaction with a web application and, in particular, the phenomena associated with wanting to use that application longer and frequently. This definition is motivated by the observation that successful web applications are not just used, but they are engaged with. Users invest time, attention, and emotion into them.

Online providers aim not only to engage users with each service, but across all services in their network. They spend increasing effort to direct users to various services (e.g.~using hyperlinks to help users navigate to and explore other services), to increase user traffic between their services. Nothing is known for users engaging across such a network of Web sites, something we call networked user engagement. We address this problem by combining techniques from web analytics and mining, information retrieval evaluation, and existing works on user engagement coming from the domains of information science, multimodal human computer interaction and cognitive psychology. In this way, we can combine insights from big data with deep analysis of human behavior in the lab or through crowd-sourcing experiments.