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.
A further difficulty, related to the first, traces to the presumption that the state of flow, like pregnancy, is either present or absent. Admittedly, it makes no sense to describe a person’s subjective state as being 30% (or 50%) ‘in flow’. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be tricked into essentializing the labels we ourselves constructed. To make sense of a scale measuring flow, it helps to recall that intensity and frequency are two facets of flow that exist on a continuum. Flow researchers did, originally, collect reports from the most exalted moments of capital C creativity: painters, poets, composers. Preliminary, anecdotal accounts from these Olympians held, in germ, the entire theory. Geniuses and ordinary folks all share these tendencies: Flow increases when clear, well-defined goals guide behavior, challenges competitively ascend in tandem with increasing expertise, and prompt feedback transmits information on the degree of success.
The theory has since been tested with more clinical data. The godfather of flow, Csik, cleverly improvised a method for tracking people’s daily activities / emotions without dragging them into a psych lab. The “Experience Sampling Method” gave research subjects a beeper, which would randomly interrupt them throughout their day to collect reports. Drug dealers were the most visible users of pocket beepers (dumber than dumb-phones, the device simply beeped and flashed the number of the last phone to call the device). The experiences sampled by this method generalized flow experiences to everyday behaviors of work and play. The data support continuous scale measurements, where flow may be more or less available, rather than being a threshold that flips on/off.
Experimental psychology is in the midst of a revolution, as academics only recently began to rigorously test whether received ideas do indeed replicate. It’s worth asking: Has Flow research stood the test of time? Have researchers built on top of the original work? Frankly, the theory has been loved and cited by many, but used by only a handful (most frequently in sports and exercise psychology).
After I looked into the original sources, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that the field is handicapped by limited tools available as instruments. Two different scales exist for measuring flow. The authors of the more widely cited scale view their instrument as a revenue stream, since it’s copyrighted with a per-person charge to use their scale. The other published scale is shorter (13 rather than 36 questions), but some of its questions are either verbose or awkward. Clearly, a freely available, concise set of questions for flow would advance the understanding of flow. Once researchers start collecting this data, we can compare and contrast different product experiences on the Flow dimension.
Let me mention one final question. Is the flow state an unambiguously positive outcome?Reducing anxiety (and boredom) definitely moves a person closer to emotionally rewarding experiences. Two words suffice to dispel pure positivity: killing time. We can all relate negative examples of totally absorbed people. Parasitic dead zones of flow occur in almost all forms of addiction, as well as informa-voracious channel- or web-surfing. For a real scare, consult Addiction by Design. The gambling industry tries harder than even social media giants to apply psychological tricks. Waving their dark magic wand attempt to hold slot machine players in “the zone” until the player's wallets/credit cards run dry. Slots manipulate cues of pacing, colors, sounds, rhythm, and more to sustain a level of absorption that, for all intents and purposes, would reach a 10 out of 10 level on scales of flow.
To distinguish “good flow” (rewarding, intrinsically motivated absorption in a task) from “bad flow” (killing time), we must consider the wider context in which that behavior occurs. As Dana Chisnell taught me, the meaning of an experience determines how we evaluate it. Pleasurability and our degree of fluid absorption independently add oomph to a person's psychological state. Some products, without making any positive contribution to the world, might still hope to design an engaging, pleasure-giving benefit. Mule Design has been a pioneer in mapping this problem space. Design decisions embed an ethical stance on what sort of life we want to live. Let's master flow for the good fight.