 This video is part one of our series on user engagement and user engagement research. What is user engagement? User engagement is a person's mental, emotional, and temporal investment in an interaction with the digital system. Where and when does user engagement occur? Engagement occurs in a wide variety of digital environments. They influence unique user goals, tasks, and outcomes. Furthermore, user needs and motivations aren't static, and understanding the dynamic behavior of different users may help predict and improve digital experiences for specific audiences. How do researchers study user engagement? Researchers explore and test different antecedents or factors that influence user engagement. These include a digital system's design or appearance, content or the information that's being shared, and users' individual characteristics such as how familiar a user is with a certain platform. By exploring and testing different antecedents and analyzing users' interactions with digital systems, researchers can better understand how to improve digital interactions for different people. What research methodologies are best for studying user engagement? Researchers can benefit from considering a wide range of approaches and questions, including how do you define user engagement? Are you trying to capture user engagement as a process or a product of an interaction? How invested should the users be in their digital experience? And how do variables and different digital systems impact user engagement? No matter the study, user engagement research can benefit from qualitative methods such as observations and interviews and quantitative methods such as neurophysiological signals, user behaviors, and self-report questionnaires. Additionally, researchers can use measures that are established and emerging. This can include the user engagement scale, which has been tried and tested over many years in a different digital context. Conversely, collecting data from neurophysiological signals of arousal are more exploratory and can be limited in its ability to distinguish when a searcher is engaged or frustrated. Research methods can also be subjective and objective, including utterances from an interview or tracking someone's eye movements on a screen. While objective measures may seem more accurate, they are still subject to interpretation by the researcher and aren't necessarily better than subjective methods. Regardless, all research methods should consider the context in which the digital interaction is taking place. Our next video will explore specific aspects of user engagement research, including individual differences and domain knowledge. We hope you join us and thanks for watching.