Does engagement stay a KPI?

The question

If the system works well the interaction gets shorter. Do we still want to measure time spent, sessions, pages?

Why it is a decision, and why it is the most uncomfortable one

Because engagement is not a neutral metric: it is a metric that selects product behaviours. The corpus shows this from three different angles that all point the same way.

• “Engagement metrics reward systems that create attachment” — and the taxonomy of compulsive use names the design mechanisms that feed it: systematic agreeableness, persona personalisation, immediate gratification.
• Product metrics “reward silence”, that is, they reward not disclosing.
• Onboarding, tours and wizards “should be considered a cost”: time spent understanding the product is not value.

Put together: if engagement stays the KPI, the product will optimise towards attachment, reticence and dwell time. Three things the rest of this site treats as damage.

The cost of either branch

Abandoning it means being left without a daily, legible, shared indicator, and replacing it with slower ones — first-attempt success, conversion, qualification, return.

Keeping it means that the decisions on the trust budget, on the delegation scale and on empathetic register will be lost one at a time, each against a weekly number.

How the replacement is measured

The corpus offers two explicit candidates: first-attempt success, which the phenomenon on the learning curve proposes in place of learnability; and the four behavioural trust indicators — cancellation after an automatic action, external verification of the output, drop-off at confirmation points, switching automation off after a trial.

Neither is a full substitute for engagement, and this has to be said: they are slower, less legible and they do not answer the question “how did this week go?”. Whoever decides to abandon engagement accepts no longer having that answer.

Who decides

This is not a product decision: it is a decision about how the company judges the product. It goes where objectives are approved. If it stays with product, product will defend every individual choice against its own KPI, and lose.

Where it falls

Empathy and social presence, Trust, AI literacy and calibration, Zero learning curve, The customer journey shortens, Memory and context adaptation.