Flow in everyday things?

David Hayward brings up some great points about the potential for system fatigue in systems that employ game mechanics. Indeed, if we lived in the game apocalypse world envisioned by Jesse Schell, it all might be a bit boring in the long run.

That said, I don't think it's really a question of do we use game mechanics in whatever system we design. Rather, how is it that we facilitate flow in all experiences?

Related:
an old post of mine on flow
Cultivated Play

Quick thoughts on motivation

Some great minds talked recently about extrinsic and intrinsic motivations with regards to designing social systems a la leaderboards. The notion of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations also came up in some posts (part 1 and part 2) talking about motivations of volunteers.

Personally I think we are at our best when our internal and external motivations are balanced. The challenge is getting there.

ABCD's of Social Media

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Yesterday I did a workshop on Social Media with some other folks at KCBS for a leadership conference. This presentation is part of a larger session where we worked with video, audio, non-moving visuals (text, images, etc) and media justice. Hope you enjoy it. Would love your feedback

When individual interests and the public good intersect

With a new fiscal year upon us, my role is shifting a bit. as a part of that, i've been taking a closer look at community planning, broadly speaking. during this process, i keep on coming back to a best practice of sorts that occurs when individual interests intersect with the public good.

while this can be applied to just about anyplace where individuals and the public intersect, i'd like to call out flickr in this regard. one of the killer features (in my opinion) on flickr is "interestingness." according to flickr, many actions go into determining whether or not a picture is "interesting." these actions include:

• where the click throughs are coming from
• who marks it as a favorite
• it's tags
• and much more

taking a closer look at those actions, they are all focused on the self. clicking through to a picture is to actually display the full image. favoriting is so you can find it again. tagging it helps you to find it among countless other photos. in short, the individual actions of people then go into surfacing "interesting" photos for everyone.

what is the public benefit? seeing what others on the site find most interesting. other benefits include inspiration for photographers -> better photographers, or the joy from looking at beautiful photos. many of these items are also very individual goals, but overall, the public benefits as a result of these actions.

how this relates back to overall community planning is that i think a rather nice framework, or at least pillars to keep in mind, can be derived from this example.

1 -- know your audience
2 -- what's in it for them? identify the actions and items of highest individual value
3 -- what's in it for everyone else? identify the actions and items of highest collective value
4 -- determine the points of intersection
5 -- focus efforts on making it as easy as possible for the individuals to perform those actions, find those items, etc

note -- this is in part derived from earlier readings on flow, game design and the like. nod to amy jo kim for calling this out initially

Getting into the flow of campaigns

The year 2007 is barely two months old and we are well into the thick of things when it comes to presidential politics for 2008. With candidates announcing their intention of running, or that they are actually running just about every week, it certainly makes for interesting times. And by judging by the websites and presence online for each of these prospective candidates, we've come quite a long way from the "early days" of online fundraising a la Howard Dean. Unfortunately, it also seems that not much ahs changed with regards to people "getting it."

Recently I ran across a few posts by Zack Exley on this topic. In his first post, he talks about the role of authenticity. Specifically:

Building a “genuine relationship” with your supporter base online doesn’t mean simply writing the same boring emails, but writing them yourself. No, it means writing to your supporters from the campaign trail in the same way that you might write to your spouse (without the smoochy stuff) or to a close friend: tell them the exciting things you experienced that day, what they made you think of, a joke you heard, and what occurred to you is really at stake. Some emails could be four pages, and some could be four sentences. Maybe sometimes you should just send a picture you snapped yourself.

In another post Zack continues on this theme of writing one's own emails to would be supporters:

If you can spend six hours per day on high-dollar fundraising, you can take 15 minutes to jot out a note to your supporters.

These posts are echoed by Eve Fairbanks (via Personal Democracy Forum) where she says:

assimilating Internet tactics doesn’t mean you have to assimilate Internet culture, too

As I wade through all of this in my spare time, I am struck by the juxtaposition of reasoning for people in New Hampshire wanting to keep their early primary. Every time the Presidential election rolls around, the state of New Hampshire gears up for the onslaught of cameras and visits by Presidential hopefuls. While there is something likely to be said for the "I shook so and so's hand" the common theme conveyed by a recent ABC News report was that this hands-on, personable campaigning is the way it's supposed to be.

"It's the way politics should be," New Hampshire resident William Juch said of the onslaught. "These people should come and present themselves."

Put another way, I would suggest that this is a more authentic approach as people are able to look a candidate in the eye, talk with them face to face, and perhaps even challenge them as one would a peer. In other words, the interactions with a candidate provide a sense of feedback to those engaged in the process. Sounds a bit like flow now, doesn't it?

Achieving that flow state for user experiences

What would happen if you took great game design principles and applied them to product development for something other than games? Would you get a really fun and engaging product? Or would you get a product that completely misses the mark? I don't know the answer just yet, but I suppose that is one of the good things about iterative product development :-)

In terms of what I've been able to gather so far, there's a few different variations on the theme with regards to this general notion of flow and or fun. According to social architect Amy Jo Kim, the elements to pay attention to with regards to game design include:

• Collecting
• Points
• Feedback
• Exchanges
• Customization

Another writer on this topic of games and design, DanC, has these elements listed:

• Action
• Blackbox
• Feedback
• Mastery

According to a recent report about the motivational pull of video games (pdf), the following criteria are listed:

• Autonomy
• Competence
• Presence
• Intuitive
• Relatedness

All of these items seem to be related to this broader concept of flow. Flow is perhaps best described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where he lists the following as the principle elements that facilitate this space:

• Challenge
• The ability to concentrate on that challenge
• Clear goals
• Immediate feedback
• Deep involvement on the part of the participant
• Sense of control over one's actions
• The concern for one's self decreases
• Sense of time is skewed

To put it in a more user friendly way, Karim Lakhani and Robert Wolf (pdf) describe flow as a state that occurs when "a person's skills matches the challenge of a task." Put another way, it is when your skills, experiences and knowledge all sync up to a particular situation at hand and you are in the moment when you are at your best.

Wouldn't it be great if all the users of your products and or services felt like that all the time? Seems to me that elements of flow or good game design need to be factored into the overall product development cycle.

Building upon what I've encountered so far (I'm still going through Csikszentmihalyi's book on flow, among some other references) I would say that for product development that helps prospective and current customers achieve that flow state, the following items must be considered throughout the entire design process:

Assuming that a user does a specific action and something happens behind the scenes, the following items should be considered:

• Feedback
• Personalization
• Connection
• Mastery
• Optimization

In the case of a discussion forum where someone posts a message this flow state could look like this:

Feedback -- Message appears in location selected

Personalization -- This could be as simple as providing a personalized greeting acknowledging contribution in your native language, listing your name, etc in a conversational style or as complex as a personalized email doing the same.

Connection -- Provide links to other people who posted similar content or who are interested in similar content

Mastery -- Enable a notion of leveling tied specifically to the action of posting. The more messages a user posts, the more adept they are at the interface. Acknowledge the time (no matter how small) it takes for them to post a message. Something as simple as listing the message count, or something as complex as a reputation system tied to the frequency of content creation could be implemented here.

Optimization -- "Leveling up" needs to open up new opportunities for folks to do more. As a particular individual masters a specific action, let them do more to further optimize their experience. It could be skipping steps in a workflow because they know how to best do it, or it could be granting of additional options for them in posting a message.

...

Zooming back down to my day to day with blogs and forums...my sense is that much of this already exists to varying degrees. Granted, it could tie together more. For that matter, it could even tie together flow states for both blogs and forums. There's likely a lot more here...so I appreciate any thoughts and comments folks have on all this. thanks!


(crossposted)

slowing down, snowing down

Last night during the rush hour commute, the Puget Sound region was hit again by snow, ice and rain. Needless to say, it did not make for a fun commute. After spending about two hours waiting for a bus that never showed, I ended up hitching a ride with others trying to make it back to Seattle. Were it not for the generosity of Marcel, I don't know how I would have gotten home as the buses I could have taken either never showed or they were stuck in the ice.

While his kindness is not surprising, I still wonder why shared experiences, or shared difficulties seem to bring people closer together. A few years ago, I wrote upon this a bit...here's a little snippet from 2005:

Another example of how the unexpected can be a good thing would be what happens in Seattle when it snows. First, it rarely snows, and if it does, it rarely sticks around. So it is not that surprising that people in this city get all "weird" when it comes to snow. For days the top news story was the snow. This overall weirdness though, is somewhat unique though. At work last week when it snowed, the focus of everyone in the office was elsewhere. People worried about how to get home, some had to get their kids from school, others looked in awe at the big fluffy flakes falling from the sky. Regardless of how individuals reacted, there was this overall giddiness in the office. Likewise, it seemed that there was this sense of wonder for all experiencing the snow. Just a few years ago when it did snow heavily and stay, the city of Seattle literally shut down. Hills turned into ski slopes. Neighborhood restaurants never looked so packed. The place down the corner from me turned into a ski chalet, offering free hot chocolate to those braving the weather...

...this notion of surprise and shared experience seems key in terms of bringing people together. It seems to shake people momentarily from their day to day routine, and we are all then able to look at the world with a sense of wonder, possibility and play.

Following the big windstorms in Nov 2006, a local columnist also commented on this notion of community here

All of this makes me wonder, are we *too* distracted in this day and age of constant activity and connectedness to really be connected to one another as a community? Kathy Sierra wrote recently on how our flow seems to get disrupted with all the noise of mail, feeds and the like. Do we all just need a good old fashioned "snow day" once in awhile to better ground us so we truly are better connected to one another? As much fun as that might be, that's not a good longterm solution. I get the feeling that this magic formula of community through serendipity has to do more with this notion of flow and play in everyday life. Now, if I only knew how to bottle it ;-)

(cross posted On community...)