What could behavioral scientists contribute to creating healthy invigorating environments? The psychophysical dimensions of sound and lighting are well-studied.

When we accidentally harm another person, it’s hard to let it pass without at least begging a pardon. A legitimate apology owns the responsibility, by seeing what I did to harm someone. This explains the inadequacy of a non-apology apology: “I’m sorry you made X worse than I intended.” An apology should also recognize the impact upon the other person. Ideally, an apology includes some kind of repair, either immediately or for a future recurrences.

This post aims to give the people what they want: a product experience metric for flow based on a brief, handy measurement tool. Although developed via quantitative studies, this flow scale has also proved useful in face-to-face interviews and smaller scale usability sessions. Anyone is welcome to take these questions into their own user studies. Let me know how it goes

Peter Drucker is credited with the motto, “what gets measured, gets managed.”

Experience designers know they must attend closely to every facet of the customer's interaction with their product. Making it as easy as possible is certainly top of mind. Silicon Valley's march of progress has largely depended upon sanding away every unnecessary speed bump.

Experience designers are unanimous in seeing flow as a powerful aspect of experience. The enthusiasm for the concept is somewhat hobbled by some widely held misconceptions.

The first barrier to paying greater heed to flow is sheer conceptual difficulty. How can one really measure an entirely subjective, interior psychological state? Perhaps we don’t even need a rigorous flow-meter, since we “know it when we see it.” Different observers probably do agree as to whether and when flow experiences occur (though I haven’t seen data on this). Even so, artisanal, impressionistic assessments are, by their very nature, un-scalable. I’ve been in hundreds of usability sessions, yet never seen testers explicitly track the presence of flow.

Can product designers induce a sense of flow? Once you remove all the obvious barriers (excessive cognitive demands, confusing options, choice overload), congratulations! The product experience may now be a safe but solid emotional zero.

What factors attract and sustain a flow state?

Today, let’s look what blocks “optimal experience.” In our first post, we gave an overview of “flow.” Basically, right-sizing challenges enables a person to engage fully with a task, as awareness of one’s self and the wider world drop away.

Many if not most user experience professionals, game designers, and product people are familiar with flow. Insiders can even pronounce the name of the field’s founder, Csikszentmihaly (hint: Chic-sent-me-hi).

Psychologists have studied the nature of high-quality, intrinsically rewarding experiences for decades. Pioneer work looked at the creative process of artists (such as painters, poets, surgeons).* Researchers found commonalities when they eventually sampled more mundane activities. Conversing with friends, working out at the gym, or watching TV all share structural similarities with more exalted experiences.

It doesn’t take a Stanford PhD to recognize that many of us have difficulties explicitly committing ourselves, especially in any areas of our life that we care deeply about. Paradoxically, the higher a person values an outcome, the less likely they are to have articulate goals to achieve their desire. I say “paradoxically,” since it’s relatively straightforward to persuade others that they have a means to get more of what they want, but it's incredibly difficult to get them to act on that knowledge.

A goal is the mind’s favorite solution to the body’s problems. Goals are one of the most potent, almost incantatory, mental objects we can create.

In the Silivalley party running up to “Y2K,” I was a Stanford grad student, Left Behind, who watched as many classmates got raptured into booming startups. In the summer of ’97, a great experimentalist, Al Bandura, held a popup seminar to discuss his newly published Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Self-Efficacy might be boiled down to the slogan: “Self-confidence counts (but it's hard to sustain).” Mental representations impact our abilities and accomplishments. It matters what we think we are doing: Are we practicing or learning, are we performing or being judged?

I've noted how common it is for us to avoid setting goals for things that matter most. Each time I prompted people to write their goals down, I repeatedly observed that the most valued aspirations had the skimpiest goals. This gap, the Delmore Effect, shows up whenever people value something so highly that they end up actively avoid concrete planning. Apparently, intense desire can mobilize anxiety about failure, which pushes us away from effort to make the desire explicit.

In this second post, I need to introduce the fundamental fact of behavioral strategy: If you know the emotions your product evokes, you know the choice they’ll make. My first post (Design as Choice Architecture) sketched 3 domains where behavioral economics can facilitate ‘making good choices.’

Today’s topic focuses on How Irrational Behaviors Undermine Self-Interest. My next post examines Why Tracking/Goal-Setting Fails. Our final overview dives into How Belonging is often a social animal’s strongest drive.

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As software continues to nibble through every human sphere, there’s one constraint that won’t change: the human mind. This is the first in a series of posts to introduce relevant psychological concepts that designers must learn to guide choosers (a more accurate term than ‘users.) By introducing the concept of Choice Architecture, I hope to explain read more

What’s a Self Anyway? Is it Fashioned, Quantified, Regulated, Nudged?

At this year’s Quantified Self conference, the first breakout with Natasha Schüll addressed foundational themes in QS: What does all this tracking aim to accomplish? What does this nerdy community’s obsessive behavior portend for the wider world? Will we delegate the labor of self-regulation to these data-swooping technologies?