Swipe and tell: Using implicit feedback to predict user engagement on tablets

Abstract

When content consumers explicitly judge content positively, we consider them to be engaged. Unfortunately, explicit user evaluations are difficult to collect, as they require user effort. Therefore, we propose to use device interactions as implicit feedback to detect engagement. We assess the usefulness of swipe interactions on tablets for predicting engagement and make the comparison with using traditional features based on time spent. We gathered two unique datasets of more than 250,000 swipes, 100,000 unique article visits, and over 35,000 explicitly judged news articles by modifying two commonly used tablet apps of two newspapers. We tracked all device interactions of 407 experiment participants during one month of habitual news reading. We employed a behavioral metric as a proxy for engagement, because our analysis needed to be scalable to many users, and scanning behavior required us to allow users to indicate engagement quickly. We point out the importance of taking into account content ordering, report the most predictive features, zoom in on briefly read content and on the most frequently read articles. Our findings demonstrate that fine-grained tablet interactions are useful indicators of engagement for newsreaders on tablets. The best features successfully combine both time-based aspects and swipe interactions.

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