Don’t confuse engagement sales data with user experience

Over at the HBR blog Michael Schrage reacts to how Samsung outsells Apple by an increasing margin while engagement is much higher on iPhones by concluding “Designing a great device is not the same as designing a great user experience” and tells us “don’t confuse engagement with user experience”.

I think we can loosely equate engagement with user experience. Engagement is a measure of how much people actually use your product and correlates highly with a positive user experience. Engagement doesn’t equal purchase it equals use. What we shouldn’t confuse with either engagement or user experience is sales data. The only thing sales data tells us is how well you can sell…it doesn’t necessarily say anything about the quality of the product.