Increasing user engagement in ICT-based social innovation projects

Abstract

Social Innovation is a domain of innovation that has become very popular over the last decade. All over the world, social challenges like the growth of population, climate change, migration, unemployment and diversity need an innovative social solution. Lack of User Engagement has been identified by the authors as one of the problems that social innovation projects face. The author of this thesis did a systematic literature review in order to explore the current knowledge on the severity of the user engagement problem as well as on the ways to measure and increase user engagement on those projects. On top of that, a survey-based research has been designed and conducted in order to see how the situation in projects in the real world is and which of the ways from the literature are used and what the successfulness of them. The findings of the research conducted proved to be of particular interest. From the social innovation projects that participated in the research more than 71% stated that they face from a moderate to a serious user engagement problem. The literature review has yielded 12 and 24 distinct ways to measure and increase user engagement, respectively. But according to the results of the survey, such ways are far from widely known and applied; around half of the ways were not used by 40% of the projects or more. Ways to measure user engagement using online behavior metrics and self-reported engagement were more popular than ways measuring the cognitive engagement. Gamification elements as ways to increase user engagement, which are popular in the scientific literature, were on average the least popular ways used to increase user engagement. A repository containing these methods has been created. An automated tool has been designed and implemented to assist the social innovation project owners to deepen their knowledge of the ways to increase user engagement and to assist them to select the best-fitted ways to increase user engagement on their projects.