Mounia Lalmas

Who they are

The publisher's page lists Lalmas at Yahoo Labs in the United States at the time of the book, with O'Brien at the University of British Columbia and Yom-Tov at Microsoft Research. Those are affiliations at publication. The sources read for this page do not give a biography, a current position or a list of other work, and this page does not supply them.

Credit follows the byline: Lalmas is the first author and O'Brien and Yom-Tov are co-authors. The Why We Project cites the book as Lalmas, O'Brien and Yom-Tov, and names Lalmas as the lead.

The book is a survey of methods from a research field, not a study with a single result. It should be cited for what it says about measurement, and not for any particular effect.

Key papers

Lalmas, M., O'Brien, H., & Yom-Tov, E. (2014). Measuring User Engagement. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Morgan & Claypool.

According to the publisher's description, the book examines how user engagement is measured, where engagement is the quality of interacting with an online application and the desire to keep using it. It covers self-report questionnaires, observational methods, neuro-physiological signals and web analytics. The description says each approach carries trade-offs: small laboratory studies are rich but hard to generalise, while large-scale web analytics is powerful but strips away user motivation and context.

The authors treat engagement as a multifaceted, complex phenomenon, and the stated aim is to help readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of each method and to encourage good measures and good measurement practice.

Only the publisher's description was read for this page. The text of the book was not.

The book matters to the Why We Project for a specific reason. Most writing about attention and engagement treats the dashboard figure as the fact and argues about its causes. Lalmas, O'Brien and Yom-Tov start earlier, with the question of what a measurement of engagement can capture at all. Their answer, as the publisher describes it, is that no single approach captures it, and that the choice of method decides which part of the experience is visible. A reader who takes one number from one method as the whole of engagement has made a choice without noticing it. The Why We Project uses the book for that framing and for nothing beyond it.

Key ideas

The first idea is that engagement is not one thing. A questionnaire, a camera, a physiological sensor and a server log each capture a different slice. A single count from any one of them is a partial view.

The second is a trade between depth and scale. Methods that tell you why a person behaved as they did tend to reach few people. Methods that reach millions record what happened and not why. Web analytics sits at the scale end of that trade.

The third follows for practice. A dashboard of Engagement Metrics is built from the scale end, so it inherits the missing motivation and context. That is the point at which the studies of Good Abandonment and Ads Blindness become relevant, since each is a case where the missing reason changed what the count meant.

The fourth is an invitation to combine methods. The description frames the book as guidance on good measures and measurement practice. This page does not report which combinations the book recommends, because the text was not read.

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