“User engagement” is code for “addiction”
Here&#x27;s an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way.<p>I own <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.executeprogram.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.executeprogram.com</a>, which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.)<p>Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitors are amenable to binging. It&#x27;s true of books, video learning platforms, and most&#x2F;all other interactive learning platforms.<p>Execute Program is very intentionally non-bingeable. When you start a course, you get 5 lessons on the first day, then it stops you and tells you to come back tomorrow. On the next day, you get some brief reviews of yesterday&#x27;s lessons, then a few new lessons, then it stops you again until the next day. That cadence repeats until you finish the course. You can&#x27;t binge&#x2F;cram even if you want to.<p>(A bit more technical detail: it&#x27;s a spaced repetition system with exponential review intervals, similar to those used for language learning in e.g. WaniKani and Anki. But it also has a lot of fine-grained knowledge of its own course structure, so it can use reviews to intelligently unlock different lessons depending on how the user performed on their reviews.)<p>Occasionally, we get support email from new users who don&#x27;t like this. They want to cram a whole course in a day. But cramming is a very time-inefficient way to learn, so this is self-defeating! Since launch, we&#x27;ve had good success adjusting the app&#x27;s behavior and internal explanations to reduce these complaints.<p>However, we still get emails from long-term users who appreciate the time limitations. Generally these fall into two categories:<p>1. Users like that an enforced break before the reviews provides tangible evidence that &quot;yes, I genuinely understood yesterday&#x27;s lessons&quot;. If we allowed cramming, that reassurance wouldn&#x27;t exist; it&#x27;s too easy to succeed at a review when you just finished the lesson 30 seconds ago.<p>2. Users like that the usage limits remove a source of anxiety and worry. You do your reviews and lessons, you finish, and then you wait until tomorrow. There&#x27;s no temptation to think &quot;I really should&#x27;ve done 10 lessons today instead of 5; I&#x27;m so lazy&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s still possible for a very dedicated user to do all of our courses in parallel within their first monthly billing cycle. (Median course start-to-finish time is 8-18 days depending on the course.) So this scheme doesn&#x27;t make users pay us more than they would otherwise. And they&#x27;re spending the same amount of wall-clock time that they&#x27;d spend if they crammed all of the lessons in one day. That makes it pure win: they memorize the topics more deeply, they worry less, and they get those benefits for no extra time expenditure. The only exception I can think of would be people who think &quot;I must get exposure to all TypeScript syntax and semantics before tomorrow morning, even if that significantly reduces my ability to remember what I learned.&quot;<p>Obviously I&#x27;m very biased here, and the goals that we&#x27;re optimizing for don&#x27;t even exist in most other product spaces. But I thought it would be nice to have a counterexample to &quot;engagement at all costs&quot;.