Improve User Engagement Research Articles

Pengaruh sosial media terhadap user engagement pada akun facebook perpustakaan perguruan tinggi

Introduction. This research aims to determine the utilization of social media, especially Facebook in academic libraries. It explores the impact of Facebook content to user activity with the level of user engagement. This research is considered signifincat due to the fact that social media has not been used optimally by the libraries.Data collection methods. This research used a qualitative approach method with interviews by considering user engagement parameters in 4 categories: (1) Literature Exhibits (2) Engaging topic (3) Community Building (4) Library showcasing. This study also used data histories and Facebook content. Using 5 state academic libraries, the data was gatheres by grouping the data of the user engagement with the followers’ response including activities of like, comment, shares from each account.Analysis Data. This research was analysed by using a content analysis.Results and discusions. Most libarires post the category of Library Showcasing, while most users respond to the category Enganging Topics. Facebook has effects of increasing user engagement . It is found that there is a mismatch between postings from admin staff and the follower responses.Conclusions. Social media function in library is considered as an effective channel of communication, promotion, marketing as well as to improve user engagement. The decicion making related to library services by utilizing social media has not been conducted.

Influence of Personality and Differences in Stress Processing Among Finnish Students on Interest to Use a Mobile Stress Management App: Survey Study.

BackgroundExcessive stress has a negative impact on many aspects of life for both individuals and societies, from studying and working to health and well-being. Each individual has their unique level of stress-proneness, and positive or negative outcomes of stress may be affected by it. Technology-aided interventions have potential efficacy in the self-management of stress. However, current Web-based or mobile stress management solutions may not reach the individuals that would need them the most, that is, stress-sensitive people.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to examine how personality is associated with stress among Finnish university students and their interest to use apps that help in managing stress.MethodsWe used 2 structured online questionnaires (combined, n=1001) that were advertised in the University of Helsinki’s mailing lists. The first questionnaire (n=635) was used to investigate intercorrelations between the Big Five personality variables (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) and other stress-related background variables. The second questionnaire (n=366) was used to study intercorrelations between the above-mentioned study variables and interest in using stress management apps.ResultsThe quantitative findings of the first questionnaire showed that higher levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were associated with lower self-reported stress. Neuroticism, in turn, was found to be strongly associated with rumination, anxiety, and depression. The findings of the second questionnaire indicated that individuals characterized by the Big Five personality traits of neuroticism and agreeableness were particularly interested to use stress management apps (r=.27, P<.001 and r=.11, P=.032, respectively). Moreover, the binary logistic regression analysis revealed that when a person’s neuroticism is one SD above average (ie, it is higher than among 84% of people), the person has roughly 2 times higher odds of being interested in using a stress management app. Respectively, when a person’s agreeableness is one SD above average, the person has almost 1.4 times higher odds of being interested in using a stress management app.ConclusionsOur results indicated that personality traits may have an influence on the adoption interest of stress management apps. Individuals with high neuroticism are, according to our results, adaptive in the sense that they are interested in using stress management apps that may benefit them. On the contrary, low agreeableness may lead to lower interest to use the mobile stress management apps. The practical implication is that future mobile stress interventions should meaningfully be adjusted to improve user engagement and support health even among less-motivated users, for instance, to successfully engage individuals with low agreeableness.

Developing and implementing a gamification method to improve user engagement: A case study with an m-Health application for hypertension monitoring

The lack of engagement throughout a patient’s treatment is a regular concern among health professionals, who have been adopting technology as a motivational factor. This study presents a gamification proposition that aims to promote engagement in the user’s treatment with the use of health-related systems. Seven stages compose the method: inspection of system requirements and its functionalities; mapping of the target audience characteristics; identification of interaction flows; gamification analysis applied in similar systems; selection of gamification elements; development; and evaluation. To validate the method, we developed two versions of an m-Health application, one with the game elements and one without these elements. In the evaluation stage, 14 patients with hypertension were divided into four groups to verify if the inclusion of game elements would promote greater engagement in health care. Data collection included engagement questionnaire, technology acceptance questionnaire, system logs, and participants’ feedback. Results showed gamification favored the engagement, stimulating intrinsic motivation in the participants. Groups assisted by health professionals spent more time with the app and were motivated in maintaining control of their health. In conclusion, gamification proved to be effective for this context, since it did not add complexity to the application and promoted the desired engagement results.

Gamification: A Case Study for Evaluating the Performance of Employees

Gamification is the application of game theory concepts and techniques to non-game activities. Gamification commonly employs game design elements like point scoring, competition with others, rules of play and others to assess and improve user engagement, organizational productivity, ease of use, and usefulness. Besides its usage in many applications, Gamification can also be employed in applications to evaluate and improve the performance of employees of an organization. This study is aimed to use Gamification techniques in order to assess and improve the performance of employees of a software house who are the programmers. For that, a model based on Gamification framework has been designed. The model consists of key Gamification parameters which have direct intention to evaluate the performance of employees (programmers). After designing the model, a task management app has been developed which implements key Gamification parameters including Points, Badges, Leader boards and Rewards. The app contains some tasks categorized in three different levels of solvability: easy, moderate and difficult. Each task is associated with a deadline to complete the task and some points as a reward; that is, if a task is completed within the deadline some points are assigned to the employee depending on the category of the task. Two parameters are evaluated for employees’ performance: task completion within the deadline and the accuracy of completing the task. On the basis of these parameters, performance of employee is evaluated and rewards are assigned. Usability of the app is then tested by conducting a survey from the users of the app in order to measure key parameter like effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the use of the app.

Impact of Human Factors Testing on Medical Device Design: Validation of an Automated CGM Sensor Applicator.

Improving user engagement with continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is considered a major requirement for achieving optimal treatment efficacy. Human factors testing is needed to ensure that CGM product designs and requisite training simplify the user experience and enhance usability and patient safety. Dexcom, Inc, recently introduced a novel, "one-button" automatic sensor applicator (ASA) for use with the Dexcom G6 (rtCGM) system. The device was developed utilizing all phases of the human factors testing process. We recruited eight certified diabetes educators from independent health care institutions to conduct a comparative ease-of-use analysis to confirm the usability of the ASA. Participants judged the instructions and device to be easier to use than the previous sensor applicator.

Gamification and Behavior Change Techniques in Diabetes Self-Management Apps.

Diabetes management apps may have positive effects on diabetes self-management. It remains unclear, however, which app features are particularly effective and encourage sustained app usage. Behavior change techniques (BCTs) and gamification are promising approaches to improve user engagement. However, little is known about the frequency BCTs and gamification techniques (GTs) are actually used. This app review aims to provide an overview of BCTs and GTs in current diabetes management apps. Google's Play Store was searched for applications using a broad search strategy (keyword: "diabetes"). We limited our research to freely available apps. A total of 56 apps matched the inclusion criteria and were reviewed in terms of the features they offer to support self-management. We used a taxonomy comprising 29 BCTs and 17 GTs to evaluate the applications. Two independent raters tested and evaluated each app. Interrater agreement was high (ICC = .75 for BCTs; ICC = .90 for GTs). An average of 7.4 BCTs (SD = 3.1) and an average of 1.4 out of 17 GTs (SD = 1.6) were implemented in each app. Five out of 29 BCTs accounted for 55.8% of the BCTs identified in total. The GT most often identified was "feedback" and accounted for 50% of the GTs. The potential of BCTs and GTs in diabetes management apps has not been fully exploited yet. Only very restricted sets of BCTs and gamification features were implemented. Systematic research on the efficacy of specific BCTs and GTs is needed to provide further guidance for app design.

User Engagement Mechanisms of Online Co-Design Service: Does User Innovativeness Matter?

The customer’s shifting role makes collaboration between customer and service provider one of the most important aspects in the value co-creation process. The collaboration and active user’s role has prompted co-design to become one of the strategies for successful product development. This research proposes engagement mechanism factors that improve user engagement and encourage customers to use and buy through the co-design web service. The factors are interactive feedback with the service provider and collecting points from social media sharing. We also propose user innovativeness to moderate the predictors and improve user engagement. We utilise a scenario-based experiment for a co-design clothing web store in Indonesia. Results show that additional interactive contact with the service provider will increase a user’s engagement and likelihood of use. The effect is greater for customers with lower levels of innovativeness. In contrast, adding game elements (e.g., points) has no significant contribution to customer engagement and use intention. This research shows the value of engagement mechanisms in enabling the value co-creation process in a co-design platform. This study contributes by providing a framework for the service provider to deploy an engaging co-design service by considering both service provider factors (i.e., engagement mechanics embedded on the web) and customer-related factors (i.e., user innovativeness level) to encourage customers to use and buy through online co-design service.

A Novel User Experience Study of Parallax Scrolling using Eye Tracking and User Experience Questionnaire

Parallax scrolling technique is being devoted as a unique and an innovative trend in the web design. Parallax scrolling provides 3D perception on a web page. Previous works observed user experience issues of parallax scrolling merely based on subjective questionnaires. Their findings leave a research question whether the results are valid as a written questionnaire may be perceived differently by participants. Additionally, bias and ambiguity in the questionnaire can affect the research results significantly. To solve this research problem, we present a novel user experience study of parallax scrolling in storytelling and online shop website using eye tracking and User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). Forty ( N =40) participant joined the experiment on a voluntary basis. Each participant only interacted with one out of two websites (storytelling or online shop) and only one effect (with or without parallax scrolling). We found that parallax scrolling affected UEQ score of Attractiveness of the storytelling website ( p < 0.05). Our findings suggest that parallax scrolling improves user engagement in storytelling website. We also observed that the participants spent time almost two times faster to find an object of interest in an online shop with parallax scrolling compared with the similar task in an online shop without parallax scrolling ( p < 0.05). We thus argue that parallax scrolling is useful during interacting with particular websites that require visual object localization. In future, web designers should consider the appropriate usage of parallax scrolling to optimize user experience while avoiding additional distraction caused by this technique.

A Process Evaluation of a Web-Based Mental Health Portal (WalkAlong) Using Google Analytics.

BackgroundDespite the increasing amount of research on Web-based mental health interventions with proven efficacy, high attrition rates decrease their effectiveness. Continued process evaluations should be performed to maximize the target population’s engagement. Google Analytics has been used to evaluate various health-related Web-based programs and may also be useful for Web-based mental health programs.ObjectiveThe objective of our study was to evaluate WalkAlong.ca, a youth-oriented mental health web-portal, using Google Analytics to inform the improvement strategy for the platform and to demonstrate the use of Google Analytics as a tool for process evaluation of Web-based mental health interventions.MethodsGoogle Analytics was used to monitor user activity during WalkAlong’s first year of operation (Nov 13, 2013-Nov 13, 2014). Selected Google Analytic variables were overall website engagement including pages visited per session, utilization rate of specific features, and user access mode and location.ResultsThe results included data from 3076 users viewing 29,299 pages. Users spent less average time on Mindsteps (0 minute 35 seconds) and self-exercises (1 minute 08 seconds), which are important self-help tools, compared with that on the Screener tool (3 minutes 4 seconds). Of all visitors, 82.3% (4378/5318) were desktop users, followed by 12.7 % (677/5318) mobile phone and 5.0% (263/5318) tablet users. Both direct traffic (access via URL) and referrals by email had more than 7 pages viewed per session and longer than average time of 6 minutes per session. The majority of users (67%) accessed the platform from Canada.ConclusionsEngagement and feature utilization rates are higher among people who receive personal invitations to visit the site. Low utilization rates with specific features offer a starting place for further exploration of users in order to identify the root cause. The data provided by Google Analytics, although informative, can be supplemented by other evaluation methods (ie, qualitative methods) in order to better determine the modifications required to improve user engagement. Google Analytics can play a vital role in highlighting the preferences of those using Web-based mental health tools.

Development and evaluation of two posture-tracking user interfaces for occupational health care

The spinal column requires special care through exercises focused on muscle strengthening, flexibility, and mobility to minimize the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders that may affect the quality of life. Guidelines for spinal column exercises are commonly presented through printed and multimedia guides accompanied with demonstrations performed by a physiotherapist, occupational health expert, or physical fitness trainer. However, existing guides lack interaction and oral explanations may not always be clear to the user, leading to decreased engagement and motivation to start, continue, or complete an exercise program. In this article, we present two interactive and engaging posture-tracking user interfaces intended to promote proper spinal column exercise form. One user interface employs a wooden manikin with an integrated inertial measurement unit to provide a tangible user interaction. The other user interface presents a mobile application that provides instructions and explanations about the exercises. Both user interfaces allow recording key postures during the exercise for reference and feedback. We compared the usability of the interfaces through a series of flexion and extension exercises, monitored with an inertial measuring unit worn around the torso, and a Microsoft Kinect V2 vision-based sensor. Although no significant differences between the manikin user interface and the mobile application were found in terms of usability, the inertial measurement unit provided more accurate and reliable data in comparison to the Microsoft Kinect V2 as a result of body occlusions in front of the sensor caused during the torso flexion. Although both user interfaces provide different experiences and performed well, we believe that a combination of both will improve user engagement and motivation, while providing a more accurate motion profile.

Using Mobile Health Gamification to Facilitate Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Skills Practice in Child Anxiety Treatment: Open Clinical Trial.

BackgroundCognitive behavioral therapy is an efficacious treatment for child anxiety disorders. Although efficacious, many children (40%-50%) do not show a significant reduction in symptoms or full recovery from primary anxiety diagnoses. One possibility is that they are unwilling to learn and practice cognitive behavioral therapy skills beyond therapy sessions. This can occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of motivation, forgetfulness, and a lack of cognitive behavioral therapy skills understanding. Mobile health (mHealth) gamification provides a potential solution to improve cognitive behavioral therapy efficacy by delivering more engaging and interactive strategies to facilitate cognitive behavioral therapy skills practice in everyday lives (in vivo).ObjectiveThe goal of this project was to redesign an existing mHealth system called SmartCAT (Smartphone-enhanced Child Anxiety Treatment) so as to increase user engagement, retention, and learning facilitation by integrating gamification techniques and interactive features. Furthermore, this project assessed the effectiveness of gamification in improving user engagement and retention throughout posttreatment.MethodsWe redesigned and implemented the SmartCAT system consisting of a smartphone app for children and an integrated clinician portal. The gamified app contains (1) a series of interactive games and activities to reinforce skill understanding, (2) an in vivo skills coach that cues the participant to use cognitive behavioral therapy skills during real-world emotional experiences, (3) a home challenge module to encourage home-based exposure tasks, (4) a digital reward system that contains digital points and trophies, and (5) a therapist-patient messaging interface. Therapists used a secure Web-based portal connected to the app to set up required activities for each session, receive or send messages, manage participant rewards and challenges, and view data and figures summarizing the app usage. The system was implemented as an adjunctive component to brief cognitive behavioral therapy in an open clinical trial. To evaluate the effectiveness of gamification, we compared the app usage data at posttreatment with the earlier version of SmartCAT without gamification.ResultsGamified SmartCAT was used frequently throughout treatment. On average, patients spent 35.59 min on the app (SD 64.18) completing 13.00 activities between each therapy session (SD 12.61). At the 0.10 significance level, the app usage of the gamified system (median 68.00) was higher than that of the earlier, nongamified SmartCAT version (median 37.00, U=76.00, P<.01). The amount of time spent on the gamified system (median 173.15) was significantly different from that of the earlier version (median 120.73, U=173.00, P=.06).ConclusionsThe gamified system showed good acceptability, usefulness, and engagement among anxious children receiving brief cognitive behavioral therapy treatment. Integrating an mHealth gamification platform within treatment for anxious children seems to increase involvement in shorter treatment. Further study is needed to evaluate increase in involvement in full-length treatment.

Proximity Based Adaptation of Content to Groups of Viewers of Public Displays

Responsive design adapts web content to different viewing contexts to deliver an optimal viewing and interaction experience. Recent work proposed a model and framework for proximity-based adaptation of web content as a new dimension for responsive web design. While it was shown that the model improves the perception and user engagement for single viewers, until now, the effect had not been investigated for multiple simultaneous viewers who may be at different distances from the display. In this paper, we report on an initial study that evaluated and compared the effects of using the average distance of viewers as the basis for handling adaptation of content to multiple viewers with a classic one that adapts content based only on display characteristics. Our results show that the adaptive model provides a better view of the content and improves user engagement, but can be confusing when serving multiple viewers.

Learning to Recommend Related Entities With Serendipity for Web Search Users

Entity recommendation, providing entity suggestions to assist users in discovering interesting information, has become an indispensable feature of today’s Web search engine. However, the majority of existing entity recommendation methods are not designed to boost the performance in terms of serendipity, which also plays an important role in the appreciation of users for a recommendation system. To keep users engaged, it is important to take into account serendipity when building an entity recommendation system. In this article, we propose a learning to recommend framework that consists of two components: related entity finding and candidate entity ranking. To boost serendipity performance, three different sets of features that correlate with the three aspects of serendipity are employed in the proposed framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on large-scale, real-world datasets collected from a widely used commercial Web search engine. The experiments show that our method significantly outperforms several strong baseline methods. An analysis on the impact of features reveals that the set of interestingness features is the most powerful feature set, and the set of unexpectedness features can significantly contribute to recommendation effectiveness. In addition, online controlled experiments conducted on a commercial Web search engine demonstrate that our method can significantly improve user engagement against multiple baseline methods. This further confirms the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

PROXIMITY-BASED ADAPTATION OF CONTENT TO GROUPS OF VIEWERS OF PUBLIC DISPLAYS

Responsive design adapts web content to different viewing contexts to deliver an optimal viewing and interaction experience. Recent work proposed a model and framework for proximity-based adaptation of web content as a new dimension for responsive web design. While it was shown that the model improves the perception and user engagement for single viewers, until now, the effect had not been investigated for multiple simultaneous viewers who may be at different distances from the display. In this paper, we report on an initial study that evaluated and compared the effects of using the average distance of viewers as the basis for handling adaptation of content to multiple viewers with a classic one that adapts content based only on display characteristics. Our results show that the adaptive model provides a better view of the content and improves user engagement, but can be confusing when serving multiple viewers.

See and chat: automatically generating viewer-level comments on images

Image is becoming a predominant medium for social interactions. Automatically expressing opinions on an image, which we refer to as image commenting, has great potential to improve user engagement and thus becomes an emerging yet very challenging research topic. The machine-generated comments should be both relevant to image content and natural as human language. To deal with these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage approach, consisting of similar image search and comment ranking. In the first step, given an image, visually similar images are discovered by k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search from a large image dataset. The comments associated with these images are exploited as candidates to mimic how viewers respond to this given image. In the second step, ranking canonical correlation analysis (RCCA), which is an extension of CCA by jointly learning a cross-view embedding space and a bilinear similarity function between the views of image and comment, is exploited for ranking the candidate comments. To create a benchmark for this emerging task, we collect a dataset with 426K images with 11 million associated comments. We show that our approach achieves superior performance and can suggest viewer-level comments.

Encouraging persons to visit cultural sites through mini-games

Gamification has been recently proposed as a technique to improve user engagement in different activities, including visits to cultural sites and cultural tourism in general. We present the design, development and initial validation of the NEPTIS Poleis system, which consists of a mobile application

Metrics Feedback Cycle: measuring and improving user engagement in gamified eLearning systems

This paper presents the identification, design and implementation of a set of metrics of user engagement in a gamified eLearning application. The 'Metrics Feedback Cycle' (MFC) is introduced as a formal process prescribing the iterative evaluation and improvement of application-wide engagement, using data collected from metrics as input to improve related engagement features. This framework was showcased using a gamified eLearning application as a case study. In this paper, we designed a prototype and tested it with thirty-six (N=36) students to validate the effectiveness of the MFC. The analysis and interpretation of metrics data shows that the gamification features had a positive effect on user engagement, and helped identify areas in which this could be improved. We conclude that the MFC has applications in gamified systems that seek to maximise engagement by iteratively evaluating implemented features against a set of evolving metrics.

Creating an interaction interface to improve user engagement in virtual reality systems

Virtual Reality (VR) has come up as a pinnacle of the ground-breaking advances in computing power through developments in fields of electronics, software and mobile computing. VR systems were first introduced to target entertainment and gaming, but finds equal importance in educational and training purposes. The system used in our experiment takes help of Google’s ‘Cardboard’ platform. Although very easy to operate, extremely cost effective and portable, it lacks a sophisticated input system to facilitate interaction between virtual world and the user. We design and implement a wearable device that enables the VR system to recognize user hand movement and gesture to allow manipulation of objects in the virtual world. We measure the effectiveness of above mentioned system by usability and acceptance testing in comparison to the existing interaction techniques. The effects on user engagement is also quantified and analysed. Through our experiments, we intend to establish that such a setup is preferred by users for regular usage and improves their level of interaction and participation.

Active Involvement of End Users When Developing Web-Based Mental Health Interventions.

Although many web-based mental health interventions are being released, the actual uptake by end users is limited. The marginal level of engagement of end users when developing these interventions is recognized as an important cause for uptake problems. In this paper, we offer our perceptive on how to improve user engagement. By doing so, we aim to stimulate a discourse on user involvement within the field of online mental health interventions. We shortly describe three different methods (the expert-driven method, intervention mapping, and scrum) that were currently used to develop web-based health interventions. We will focus to what extent the end user was involved in the developmental phase, and what the additional challenges were. In the final paragraph, lessons learned are summarized, and recommendations provided. Every method seems to have its trade-off: if end users are highly involved, availability of end users and means become problematic. If end users are less actively involved, the product may be less appropriate for the end user. Other challenges to consider are the funding of the more active role of technological companies, and the time it takes to process the results of shorter development cycles. Thinking about user-centered design and carefully planning, the involvement of end users should become standard in the field of web-based (mental) health. When deciding on the level of user involvement, one should balance the need for input from users with the availability of resources such as time and funding.

Design of a Mobile App for Nutrition Education (TreC-LifeStyle) and Formative Evaluation With Families of Overweight Children.

BackgroundNutrition and diet apps represent today a popular area of mobile health (mHealth), offering the possibility of delivering behavior change (BC) interventions for healthy eating and weight management in a scalable and cost-effective way. However, if commercial apps for pediatric weight management fail to retain users because of a lack of theoretical background and evidence-based content, mHealth apps that are more evidence-based are found less engaging and popular among consumers. Approaching the apps development process from a multidisciplinary and user-centered design (UCD) perspective is likely to help overcome these limitations, raising the chances for an easier adoption and integration of nutrition education apps within primary care interventions.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to describe the design and development of the TreC-LifeStyle nutrition education app and the results of a formative evaluation with families.MethodsThe design of the nutrition education intervention was based on a multidisciplinary UCD approach, involving a team of BC experts, working with 2 nutritionists and 3 pediatricians from a primary care center. The app content was derived from evidence-based knowledge founded on the Food Pyramid and Mediterranean Diet guidelines used by pediatricians in primary care. A formative evaluation of the TreC-LifeStyle app involved 6 families of overweight children (aged 7-12 years) self-reporting daily food intake of children for 6 weeks and providing feedback on the user experience with the mHealth intervention. Analysis of the app’s usage patterns during the intervention and of participants’ feedback informed the refinement of the app design and a tuning of the nutrition education strategies to improve user engagement and compliance with the intervention.ResultsDesign sessions with the contribution of pediatricians and nutritionists helped define the nutrition education app and intervention, providing an effective human and virtual coaching approach to raise parents’ awareness about children’s eating behavior and lifestyle. The 6 families participating in the pilot study found the app usable and showed high compliance with the intervention over the 6 weeks, but analysis of their interaction and feedback showed the need for improving some of the app features related to the BC techniques “monitoring of the behavior” and “information provision.”ConclusionsThe UCD and formative evaluation of TreC-LifeStyle show that nutrition education apps are feasible and acceptable solutions to support health promotion interventions in primary care.