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Human Media Interaction Theory summary
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Human Media Interaction Theory: the psychological study of how people interact withmedia. Summary
Theme 1: Engagement
Engagement: can be understood in two ways.
1. Metrics perspective: how much interaction does the user have with the product and for
how long?
2. Cognitive-social perspective: describing and understanding the experience of
engagement.
Why do we care about engagement? Because of its positive consequences:
- Repeating activity
- Enjoyment
- Positive attitudes, loyalty
- Enhanced learning outcomes
- Enhanced performance
- Sharing, recommending, reposting, liking, posting, adding.
Flow theory: state of a holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total
involvement, feel at their best, perform at their best. It’s the optimal experience of and
engagement to activity (gaming/creativity). All cognitive, affective, and physical/motor
systems are dedicated to the same task and goal. You are not being disturbed and you feel
joy. Typical flow sub features:
1. Perfect challenge – skill balance
2. Clear goals
3. Immediate feedback (turnover)
4. Action - awareness merging (automatically, effortless)
5. Concentration (top-down attention)
6. Sense of control
7. Loss of self-consciousness (reflection)
8. Transformation of time
9. Autotelic experience (task is intrinsically rewarding)
When we study engagement, we can study 3 things:
1. The ‘antecedent’ factors (what contributes to the likelihood of flow)
2. The nature of an engaging experience (what is an engaging experience and how to
measure it)
3. The consequences of an engaging experience (what impact does high engagement
promise)
Which factors contribute to the likelihood of an optimal experience?
PAT-model (Finneran & Zang): the interplay between person, artifact, and task.
Person characteristics = trait + state
Trait:
- Autotelic personality
- one’s ability to experience intrinsic enjoyment
- some people are more moved by intrinsic motivation than others
- inherent exploratory behavior
,- personal innovativeness
- willingness to try out new techniques
- cognitive spontaneity
- individual’s playfulness with a computer
- trait of absorption
(- media and literacy skills)
State:
- mood
- motivation
- arousal
- focus
Artefact (product) characteristics: that contribute to likelihood of flow
- Aesthetics
- Vividness (unimodal or multimodal)
- Speed of feedback/responsiveness
Task characteristics: that may enhance the likelihood of flow
- Goal oriented (vs. exploratory) tasks
- Autonomy
- Variety
Task technology fit = task * artefact
Clear task goals = task * person
Sense of control over the task = task * person
Sense of control over the artifact = person * artefact
Perceived ease of use = person * artefact
For more complex tasks, perceived ease of use = person * artefact * task
Balance between skills and challenge = person * task
Measuring engagement is difficult because it’s a fuzzy concept that needs to be converted
into empirical measures. It can be operationalized into:
- Self-reports (it’s easy and fast however, this comes with biases, such as social desirability,
recall, after-the-effect)
- Behavior, for example:
Variable Measurement
Aggression from com children in playground Observing how many times they
scream/shout/hit/kick/push
Problem solving ability Time taken to complete a puzzle
Older adults People aged 65 and older
Stress Cortisol level
, Oh et al. (2018) have combined the empirical findings in the field of engagement and made
a model that includes the stages of engagement:
Point of engagement: interface assessment + physical interaction. Cf. Usability. It’s about
how people assess and evaluate the interface: is it efficient? Is it effective? Are you satisfied
with it? And it’s about physical interaction: how many clicks and behavioral interactions do
you have with the product? In the end they only tell you something about the usability.
Deeper engagement: absorption. High levels of user engagement and maybe even a flow-
like experience.
Behavioral outcome: digital outreach. How people share/recommend the product with
other people. Or write reviews about it.
Interface assessment: natural mapping ability, intuitiveness, ease of use. Before users can
become engaged with the interactive media, they first assess the interface. Users first are
attracted by its visual features, aesthetic appeal, and/or perceived usability, before they
continue in the process by interacting with it. If users find the interface ease to use and
intriguing enough, they are more likely to become deeply involved with it.
Physical interaction: scrolling, clicking, swiping, flipping, sliding, zooming, etc. Users are
controlling the flow and content of incoming information.
Digital outreach: interaction with content. Behavioral indicators: social transmission,
content management, repeated use. It extends the user’s experience into the offline world.
This enhances the possibility of the medium to go viral.
Absorption: deep involvement with task and its content, (almost) complete attentional focus
on the mediated environment. Absorption can be measured with a survey afterwards, but as
we saw this comes with biases.
Therefore, scholars are striving to come with more objectional measures. For example,
through physiological outcomes such as: skin conductance, heart rate, pupil dilation,
electromyography. However, many of these also can be used to measure arousal
level/stress/anxiety. Therefore, they do not directly measure engagement.
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