Improving Engagement Metrics in an Open Collaboration Community Through Notification: An Online Field Experiment.

Open collaboration communities depend on contributors. To foster users' engagement with collaborative systems, it is necessary to consider features related to engagement attributes, such as awareness, control, novelty, and feedback, among others. However, it is not trivial to develop a feature that effectively improves engagement, considering specific contexts. This study analyzes the notification feature with respect to its effectiveness on increasing users' engagement in open collaboration communities. We conducted an online field experiment in a real setting, analyzing the engagement of two homogeneous user groups: pre- and post-implementation of a notification feature. We measured users' engagement using recency, frequency, duration, virality, and ratings metrics. There was an improvement in frequency, recency, and duration of users after inserting the notification feature. Considering the virality metric, there were changes in the behavior of users that accessed the notification interface, but there was neither influence of the notification on the virality metric from accesses through Facebook or Google+, nor on the ratings from comments and evaluations of system contents. Our results indicate an improvement of the user's engagement, as four of the five engagement metrics had positive results.