Experience Planner

Working on a site with a serious Flash video sequence… and I find myself referring back to Chapter 2: Flow in Web Design from Andrew King’s book Website Optimization.

I’m particularly taken with this quote:

“Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor and former chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, pioneered the study of flow. He wrote that flow is the ‘holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement.’”

And, this one:

“People who have experienced flow consistently report the same nine dimensions:

• 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 sense of time
• An autotelic experience

Flow depends on how we perceive our skills and the challenges at hand. We may feel ‘anxious one moment, bored the next, and in a state of flow immediately afterward.’”

The chapter goes on to break out “experiential” and “goal-directed flow,” and it goes on to say:

“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 tasks. 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.”

Which to me is very interesting. I’ve long noticed that some people “play” with websites. They look at the layouts and how  “pretty.” Other people “engage” with websites. They’re actually interacting with functionality, leveraging features to do what they gotta do. Flow is giving control to the users, responding back to them, and providing outs and multiple paths.

King A. Website Optimization. O’Reilly, 2008.