A call to minimize distraction and respect users’ attention (2013)
All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement".  The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me.  As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits.<p>At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided.  It was useful to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to get in, get done what they need to do, and get out.  It's a tool to help them do their jobs and nothing more.<p>You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated.  The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used about that product from the marketing team, however...<p>Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators."  It fell on deaf ears.<p>I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution.  So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!