Antecedents and learning outcomes of online news engagement

Abstract

User engagement (UE) is a quality of user experience characterized by the depth of an actor's cognitive, temporal, and/or emotional investment in an interaction with a digital system. Currently more art than science, UE has gained theoretical and methodological traction over the past decade, yet there is still a need to establish empirical links between UE and desired outcomes (e.g., learning, behavior change), and to understand the myriad user, system, contextual, and so on, factors that predict successful digital engagement. This paper focuses on the relationship between UE and media format as a potential antecedent, and the outcome of learning, operationalized as short-term knowledge retention. Participants interacted with two human-interest stories in one of four media formats: video, audio, narrative text, or transcript-style text; short-term knowledge retention was measured using post-task multiple choice and short-answer questions. It was anticipated that format would have a strong effect on UE, and that more engaged users would recall more information about the stories. However, these hypotheses were not fully supported, and the nature of the relationship between UE and learning was more nuanced than expected. This research has implications for the design of information systems and, more fundamentally, the impetus to make digital environments engaging.

Engaging interaction and long-term engagement with WhatsApp in an everyday life context: exploratory study

“…After applying this scale to different fields, such as online shopping (O'Brien, 2010) and Facebook (Banhawi and Mohamad Ali, 2011), it was concluded that the initial six factors should be reduced to four: focused attention, perceived usability, aesthetic appeal and a fourth one that covers the original factors of endurability, novelty and perceived involvement. It has also been proven that only subscales suited to the distinctive features of the subject of study should be considered (O'Brien, 2017).…”

Applicability of the User Engagement Scale to Mobile Health: A Survey-Based Quantitative Study

“…One of the earliest definitions proposed that "user engagement is a user's response to an interaction that gains, maintains and encourages their attention, particularly when they are intrinsically motivated" [20]. Further definitions are given by various authors (eg, [9,[18][19][20][21][22]), and a certain overlap of aspects is apparent. For the purpose of this study, the following commonly cited principles were considered.…”

“…For the purpose of this study, the following commonly cited principles were considered. User engagement is a quality of user experience [21,22] and is multidimensional [9,18,22]. There is no consensus concerning the meaning of the dimensions, but the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions are prevalent in user engagement literature [11,14,23].…”

Systematic Improvement of User Engagement with Academic Titles Using Computational Linguistics

“…Several aspects of content have been investigated in conjunction with UE, including sentiment, interest, novelty, quality and message framing (O'Brien, 2017). Digital content has been proven to play a significant role in influencing consumers' behavior online .…”

“…Despite current research, a shared understanding of how to usefully conceptualize engaging content is lacking. Current research is focused on identifying and evaluating UE, but not on the actual development of engaging experiences (O'Brien, 2017;O'Brien & Cairns, 2016). Content is not well situated in current theory and not thoroughly researched as a determinant of UE.…”