Flow in Applications

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, September 22, 2006 @ 7:34 am

In his long-range studies, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described the condition of "optimal human experience" as "being in the flow," a state in which a person is fully engaged and in control of an activity. Although Csikszentmihalyi never specifically applied the concept of flow to user experience, several practitioners have enthusiastically bridged this gap, among them Benjamin B. Bederson and Andrew B. King.

However, much of the work on flow in HCI has been concentrated on the web experience. As a matter of fact, Csikszentmihalyi's concepts are even more relevant to the design of applications. King notes nine dimensions discerned by people who have experienced flow:

• Clear goals
• Unambiguous and immediate feedback
• Skills that just match challenges
• Merging of action and awareness
• Centering of attention on a limited stimulus field
• A sense of potential control
• A loss of self-consciousness
• An altered state of time
• An autotelic experience

It is not at all difficult to correlate most of these nine end results with the standard list of usability heuristic goals. Flow, then, is a desirable design goal, especially for applications and other task-based systems, as researchers Hoffman and Novak note:

"Less experienced users tend to see the web in a hedonic, playful way, while more experienced users tend to view the web in a utilitarian way, or a means to accomplish a task. The authors found that telepresence/time distortion, exploratory behavior, focused attention, and challenge/arousal correlated with recreational web use, while skill/control, importance, and experience correlated with task-oriented activities, such as research, work, and shopping."

As application designers, we are of course concerned with user workflows and system taskflows:  we need also concern ourselves with the aspect of "flow" that occurs within the users themselves.

Related posts:

1. Towards a concept of flow–UXD perspectives
2. Use a Task Flow to Show “How do I ___?”
3. Types of Flow – A Quick Reference
4. Get in the Flow (Task Flow that is)
5. User Experience in Sovereign vs. Transitory Applications

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