Gadgetopia

Feature Richness and User Engagement: Nielsen makes a point which we all know is true: on balance, user’s don’t give a crap about your site, only about what it can do for them. They are not engaged enough with your site to learn how to use it, so higher level functionality is generally wasted unless you do something to inspire serious user loyalty (i.e. — you are an intranet).

Where does your website fall on the 1-3 scale of user engagement we saw for Photoshop? Outside the scale, at level 4. People don’t want to read 20 pages of instructions to use a website. They demand instant gratification or they leave.

The user engagement level with websites is incredibly low, as dictated by information foraging: people don’t commit easily to any individual site, because it’s so easy to get to other sites. Skimming the cream from each site is usually the superior browsing strategy.