Persuasive2009 Panel on Engagement Metrics

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Couple weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the Persuasive2009 conference. The panel was on new metrics for engagement and I was to speak about the community health index (CHI). However, the audience was primarily social psychologists from both academia and industry. And all of them have a common interest in Persuasive technologies, which is defined by its inventor, Prof. B.J. Fogg, in his book to be any technology "that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion." So, I was challenged with the task of relating CHI to engagement and persuasion. As a scientist, I did my homework. I read up on the most authoritative research papers in this field and came up with the following strategy.

First, I evaluated the Lithium platform by a persuasive system evaluation framework. This framework was published by Prof. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen in last year's conference proceedings and has already been adopted by researchers in this field. So I thought this would be a good place to start. In addition to some basic requirements, the paper outlined 28 persuasive design features that are grouped into 4 categories. To my surprise, the Lithium platform actually met all the basic requirements. Moreover our platform currently has 25 out of the 28 persuasive features. This allowed me to confidently conclude that our community platform is in fact a very persuasive system!

The next step was to relate all this to CHI. Since the panel was on metrics for engagement, I have reinterpreted the 6 health factors of CHI as measures of engagement: 

1. Traffic: is a measure of passive engagement.

2. Content: is a measure of passive engagement.

3. Members: is the conversion rate from passive to active engagement.

4. Liveliness: quantifies the likelihood of any user to engage actively.

5. Interaction: is an estimate of the scope of the engagement.

6. Responsiveness: measures the quality of the engagement.

By reinterpreting the health factors as measures of engagement, CHI can take on a whole new meaning. Since every engagement provides an opportunity for persuasion, CHI is actually a measure of "persuasibility". Although the Lithium community platform was not designed nor thought of as a persuasive system, it can certainly be used as one. In addition, we can now measure the persuasibility of this system.

My research really paid off at the end, because it has made the Lithium platform and CHI very digestible to the audiences. I was pretty thrilled to find my framework for CHI was tweeted and blogged, by Maury Giles from Pursuit, another panelist at the conference.

Next time, I will tell you a bit more about some of the fascinating things I've learned at the conference. For updates, come and follow me at mich8elwu.

Photo by David Lin