Truly Engaging and Immersive Products or How To Keep Talent

Have you ever felt that the outside world almost ceased to exist and that time faded away? Did you feel deeply concentrated? Focused? Was it impossible to interrupt you? Did you forget to eat? Comics and books did this for me when I was a kid, my parents and child minders got mad at me for not answering when calling for me. But I wasn't rude (at least not intentionally), I was immersed.

The key is flow.

There's a lot of talk about User Experience these days. Everybody claims that it is important, but there's still lot to learn about great user experiences. A great user experience is made up by small, but well thought-through details such as as a flat package of lenses that fit perfectly in your mail or a pen, paper and measuring tape just when you need it at the entrance of Ikea. Unlike what many people seem to think, user experience is not limited to what's going on in a screen , in the same way as branding is not limited to a logo. In branding it's every encounter a consumer has with the brand. For companies working to improve their user experience, its every encounter users have with the company and its products. It includes sales, marketing, distribution, user interfaces (UIs) and customer service. With that said, users' interaction with devices is still at the core of digital services.

In the early 80s the first computers with a GUI came to market and in the late 80s the first steps were taken towards user-centered product design. Back then it was called usability engineering and was mainly focused on assisting users in successfully completing a set of tasks with as few errors as possible. User experience is a wider term taking eg. user's emotions and visual appeal into account. Research found that delightful products are perceived as easier, more trustworthy and personal. The problem with delight is that we get used to it, we take it for granted, and pretty soon the inital wow effect wears of. Truly engaging and immersive experiences have something else – the capability to help users reach flow.

In human cognition, flow is describes as focused attention, deep engagement and a feeling of mastery. People describe this state as very productive and creative. Games are good examples of experiences that often manage to put users in a state of flow. The phenomenon was first described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi .

The nuts and bolts of flow in UIs is responsiveness, affordances & feedback, clear information structure & navigation, matching challenges to skills, minimize distractions and remembering that context is key. Having a mental model in mind and conveying that to users consistently helps tremendously when designing a clear information structure & navigation. Minimizing distractions is about removing clutter and unneccessary animations if they don't help to eg. explain the mental model or give important cues to users. Learning from designing for mobile is a great tip. On the smaller mobile screen there is simply not room for too much information and chrome, which forces designers and developers to prioritize.

An interesting component of flow (and easily forgotten in the new simplistic appecomomy?), is matching challenges to skills. Apple taught us to simplify - remove and hide – features in order to design great UIs. We learned that products should be intuitive so that anyone can start using them right away. But what about when users learned the basics? Humans like to solve problems, when they match her skills or is a little above her capabilities. If problems are too difficult, it causes frustration, if they are to easy, it causes boredom. In games, for each level, the challenge gets a little bit bigger. The same way, great user experiences have levels, or layers if you like. When the first layer is mastered, users discover that there's more to learn and more to master.

If you're working in product development getting a deeper understanding of user experience, and the mechanisms behind flow, will be crucial to your business' success. Now if you're a manager of some sort, responsible for people at you workplace, you might start to realize that the same mechanisms are relevant for you. With more and more advanced software many purely analytical and serial tasks can be faster performed by computers or cheaper by workforce in Asia or eastern europe. In a time when no ideas are unique and new innovations pop up every day, creative and emphatic right-brainers are the type of problem solvers every company want (or will soon realize they want). Large corporations and agencies see their best talent leave for startups. The key for keeping talent is motivation. Motivation for right-brainers is NOT purely money and status. Even worse, research found that people promised a reward for solving an out-of-the-box problem actually performed worse than people that were not promised a reward. The reward made people too task focused and tunnel seeing. Instead, right-brainers are motivated by autonomy, meaning and mastery. Mastery - the exact same mechanism that is one of the key components in flow.