How to Sustain User Engagement over Time: A Research Agenda

User participation in the Information Systems (IS) user studies has become a popular and widely studied research topic. Understanding of how users should be involved in the projects and how to deal with the various challenges of involving users is important. Keeping users motivated over time is one of the biggest challenges in the process of user involvement. As the first step of research on how to build a sustained user engagement, the aim of this study is to identify, categorize and sum up existing research on why people drop-out of user studies before the project or activity has ended. The main findings of our study indicate that the performance of the prototype, user selection, user preparation, interaction with the users, privacy concerns and scheduling are highly influential on this issue. Based on the findings, this study also proposes a research agenda to guide future studies in this area.