Interest and Engagement

The reason that interest and engagement are often blurred into one another is that they do, in fact, have a number of factors in common.

First, the willingness of an individual to give interest or maintain engagement in a task is largely a comparison of effort to benefit.  It is as simple as a causal relationship: If I do this task, then I shall gain its benefit.  This is followed by the assessment of whether the benefits of a task in question are worth the effort that remains to be expended in order to complete it.  A person can be immediately disinterested in starting a task if the equation seems unfavorable, or they may disengage even having started if they reach the same conclusion.

The benefits and efforts of a task are often difficult to gauge.  In the business world, each benefit and effort is monetized to reduce the equation into the simplistic mathematics of money and a "return on investment" is calculated for an array of options, to be considered or compared.   This practice is flawed in that it fails to consider anything that cannot be monetized - from the perspective of a business that cares only for the sums of money it will spend and receive in the short term, this gap is unimportant - but from the perspective of an individual (employee, customer, or other stakeholder), money is often a factor of minor importance.

In our private lives, we make the same assessment in a more qualitative way: we do always not seek to make money for doing something, but to gain pleasure, emotional comfort, intellectual stimulation, and other functional or psychological benefits that do not translate into dollars and cents - nor do the "costs" of undertaking a task monetize so easily: how much is half an hour of "spare" time worth, or what is the money value of doing something a bit boring or unpleasant for that amount of time?

Coupled with this effort-benefit analysis is the level of risk (the likelihood that the effort will indeed produce the benefit expected) and the opportunity cost (other things that could be done with the same amount of time and effort that would achieve a greater benefit).   All three of these judgments contribute to becoming interested in a task that has not begun as well as remaining engaged in a task that has already commenced.

While interest and engagement are similar in that an individual assesses whether achieving a benefit is worth the effort, the manner in which effort and benefit are considered differs greatly between the time before a task has begin and when it is in progress - and failure to recognized those differences leads to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and even counterproductivity in designing the experience.