A Spoonful of Sugar

Now that we've talked about what flow is and what happens to people deprived of it, lets look at it the other way - things people love to do.

Donald Norman writes in Emotional Design that

"emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world, and how they learn new things...aesthetically pleasing objects appear to the user to be more effective, by virtue of their sensual appeal. This is due to the affinity the user feels for an object that appeals to them, due to the formation of an emotional connection [with the object]."

Flip that around. What if the affinity doesn't just make us like things more and gives us the motivation to learn to enjoy it...what if it distracts us while we do learn it?

Video games, like I said last post, are notoriously addictive and full of flow, bringing enjoyment to those who can get through the learning curve. The Wii has much less of a learning curve than most systems. Let's try analyzing the run-away success of the Wii in several different ways.

What does the Wii do different? It has motion control and a pretty direct mapping of action from analog to digital. When you learn to use the Wii, it usually follows a predictable set of experiences. Before you play the game, the Wii is giving out pleasure in the novelty of the interface, in the vibration on "mouseover", in creating a Mii character. Do not discount the little details, their effect is compounded as we shall see.

The Wii gives you pleasure immediately (In psychology terms, it reduces your anxiety) and continues on until you are capable of experiencing enjoyment - which is pretty quick. Anybody who's played Wii Sports knows that it's easy or at least low-pressure at the beginning. The interface details, the motion control, the vibration on mouseover, these are all causes of pleasure. The simple acts of creating a Mii, throwing a punch, swinging a bat or golf club or tennis racket, or rolling a ball are all acts of flow and provide enjoyment. Winning at a sports game is even more so. Nintendo has designed a console that oozes pleasure while you become capable of enjoyment. This is the path to success in product design.

Lets look at another case study.


I would say that OS X does the same thing.

What if all the eye candy on OSX with the bubbly dock and the big lush icons and the windows that fly around is a critical part of why people grow to love it so much, but has nothing to do with why they keep loving it so much? Because the pleasure allows the mind to open up to the point where enjoyment is keeping the mind engaged. Or as Kathy Sierra puts it, helping the users kick ass.

Of course, there's no argument that pure eye candy is as bad for the brain as it is for the teeth - non-nutritional at best, decaying at worst - but that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about things that give enjoyment through flow by letting you get done what you need to get done and make it look pretty even when you're not flowing. We've all heard disaster stories of pure eye candy (The Motorola RZR phone seems to be one of those) and we all know that substance over style is the way to go, but what Norman suggest up above and what Csikszentmihalyi's theory seems to agrees with is that pleasure and enjoyment can back each other up and make something that will endear the product to the user for a long time.