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? Recall the defining characteristics of Flow:
The task is in the sweet spot, neither too easy (boring) nor too hard (angst-y)
Feedback arrives quickly so that the product provides an unambiguous sense of each action’s impact
Challenges elicit an interest in building expertise / mastery
The rest of this post will look at how to turn these points into applicable guidelines for experience designers.
At the outset, let me remind designers that the zeroth step is aligning your product with the user’s true preferences. Fulfilling needs sounds straightforward, but: How do designers balance contradictory impulses? We often want dessert today AND to lose weight (or to buy a costly treat AND to save for a rainy day). Fin-tech and fitness apps often try to bridge the conflict between today’s wishes and tomorrow’s interests.
The field of behavioral economics sprang from the inexhaustible well of instances where rational interests collide with current preferences. (Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is an accurate and amusing overview of the field.)
Let me point to proven techniques to successfully channel behavior toward a better future, without breaking flow in-the-moment.
The most powerful product decisions determine where to pin the default outcome. Intelligent choice architecture aligns the chooser’s best interests with a “smart default.” Recall our flow-blocking “choice overload” example: 401K enrollment drops whenever more choices are added. Because it’s now legal to automatically default to enrollment, millions of employees have benefited. The option to neglect retirement savings is still available, but an employee must tick a box to opt-out.
Another tactic draws upon our capacity for empathy in face-to-face conversation. Psych researchers discovered, and Merrill Lynch promptly applied, an unusual on-ramp to retirement planning. Computerized graphics transform a person’s face to predict their elderly appearance. What do you suppose the impact of having a conversation about retirement with an algorithmically-aged alter-ego? People develop greater identification with their future self, and put more into savings.
Conversation offers a royal road into flow. When flow researchers sampled ordinary people’s ratings of random moments throughout the day, chatting with friends was the most prevalent source of flow (reading and sex were also in the top 3).
Another tool for flow:
Slice incremental steps into the smallest possible actions. BJ Fogg’s advocacy of “Tiny Habits” is grounded in the method of “Behavior Matching”: Fit the behavior to what a person already wants to do; insure they can do it; and then, show the impact of each tiny step.
What if a task is intrinsically challenging?How might we help a person master calculus, python programming, or the basics of French conversation? Khan Academy and Duolingo are great examples of slicing the task into tiny incremental steps. Yet, there’s still more that can be done after rigorously designing smart defaults and slicing the salami as thin as possible.
It’s sometimes necessary to inform a learner that they’re making mistakes. How can critical feedback sustain flow? It's possible to re-frame this failure, by spotlighting the opportunity to view setbacks as part of the path to greater competence. Mindset introduces Carol Dweck's research on ways to transform an experience of failure into a mastery mindset. Dweck observed that reactions differ substantially upon encountering a difficulty. Some people seem to believe that they risk appearing inadequate. Such a "performance orientation" undermines persistence. However, we can encourage people to view such experiences more constructively, by adding verbal reminders that such challenges create opportunities for building greater competence. The reframing can induce a mastery mindset, by focusing on the power of such setbacks to deepen one's skills.
To recap: Smart defaults, smooth conversational interactions, slicing tasks to the minimal progressive step all encourage entering a flow state. If and when setbacks occur, an interface can verbally encourage adopting a mastery mindset.