Engagement vs. Wellbeing

That itch in your mind that wants to unlock your phone. You want to jump to your newsfeed only to realize that you have already seen all of this before. Yet you keep coming back, hoping for the next hit. You are an addict and social media and news are your drug. This is the inevitable result of an unending race for user engagement at the growing expense of our wellbeing.

So many services today are focused on user engagement. Engagement is measured as how many users are using your product how frequently. Products are judged based on their engagement numbers. Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a top line measure of tech consumer business. Engagement drives advertising as more engagement means more opportunities for impressions, clicks and ultimately conversions. The accepted key to a successful consumer business is building engaging products.

In healthcare, there is strong evidence that strong engagement in health programs leads to better outcomes. This makes sense, as those that take an interest in actively adhering to a treatment program are going to get more benefits from the treatment.

Yet our hunger for engagement is leaving us unfulfilled. Apps build compulsive behavior where users engagement with them over and over without real value. The association with social media and depression appears likely. Over engagement also makes us more passive. The ratio of content that we consume vs. create continues to decline with so much media consumption. Click bait drives down the level of discourse driving us further apart.

In healthcare, our drive towards continuous user engagement is acting as a never ending reminder to our users that they have a disease. Who would want to be constantly reminded of their imperfection and mortality?

People with diabetes don’t just have a health condition, they have monkey on their back. Is it any surprise that people in such situations drop out of programs, stop testing glucose and even go on insulin holidays? Chronic disease causing anxiety in depression is almost inevitable, especially with these constant reminders of our imperfection.

Instead of rushing for never ending engagement, we should be optimizing for something else: wellbeing. Wellbeing, while harder to quantify, is really what we are after. If someone can manage their disease without engaging with a program and get good clinical outcomes, their wellbeing will certainly be higher than someone that is constantly managing.

How should we measure wellbeing? We need to combine many signals together. Physical health measures must be combined with measures of mental, financial and social health. It isn’t enough to improve someones life along one dimension by wrecking it along others.

So what kinds of principles should we use for technology programs to favor wellbeing over engagement? Here are a few:

I’m a tech optimist and I believe that we can do better. As a species we are prone to obsession and overindulgence in things that aren’t always good for us. Just striving for engagement leads to emptiness. Engagement with technology is not the goal; it is but a tool to achieve wellbeing.

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