Engagement that Arises

In looking through comments about films, I noticed two reviews (which were really descriptions of personal experiences) of the same film:

• An individual who thought the film looked interesting, but who stopped watching after about half an hour because she found it to be unengaging 
• Another individual who was not interested in the film, but sat down to watch it with friends, and found himself drawn into it after a while

Neither of these experiences is unusual, but their juxtaposition got my wheels turning on a basic problem with the design of customer experiences. Specifically, it is assumed that people have a good sense of what interests them, and it is also assumed that they remain interested throughout an experience once they have engaged in it. 

The two comments above, while seemingly opposite, are actually quite the same in one regard: a person failed to accurately predict whether they would find something engaging and enjoyable.  Whether they thought they would not and then did, or thought that they would but then did not, it is a clear misidentification of one’s own interests.

This leads to a third and more troubling problem for experience design: the assumption that the moment a person who drops out of a flow has encountered an obstruction that caused them to suddenly become disinterested in completing the task.  There may be nothing at all wrong with the activity, merely that the person recognized only after beginning the task that it was not something that interested him – and that his initial prediction of interest was wrong.

Granted, there are instances in which there actually is a problem: there’s an awkward phrase that makes it difficult to understand how to perform a task or causes an individual to become anxious about whether what they are doing will achieve the outcome that is expected.   But there are also instances in which a person’s interest simply wanes, and would wane no matter what was done with the experience.

A good example of this would be the “landing pages” that are created for online advertising: when a person clicks an ad, they arrive at a page that is custom-built for their presumed interest based on the advertisement they clicked.   The bounce rate for these pages is extremely high and no-one has yet developed a reliable solution to the problem that applies in all instances. That is, there is nothing about the landing page that is scaring people away – but they came to the realization, after clicking through, that they really were not interested in the offer.

This seems like something that would be difficult to validate, as it is impossible to determine the real reason that someone decides to take an action (or desist from taking what we perceive to be the next action in a natural sequence) – and it also seems to lend itself to apathy, in that if we accept that it’s all up to the customer and we have no power to influence them, we may allow valid problems to fester.

But it does support the notion that sometimes there’s just nothing to “fix” and tinkering with the experience would do more harm than good.   Ultimately, we can derive intent from behavior, and it is likely that the instances in which an individual’s misestimating their own interest has a much smaller impact than a valid issue.  In all, it may deserve a bit more consideration.