Nine Qualities of Optimal Experience

Positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has explored the various qualities of “optimal” experience by interviewing individuals about activities they find to be engaging, and provides a list of nine common factors:

1. A clear sense of purpose.  In contrast to daily activities, in which we do many things in a ritual manner, flow activities involve a clear sense of purpose and the actor knows exactly what he needs to be doing at each step of the way to progress toward his goal.
2. Immediate feedback.  Enjoyment occurs in activities where the actor knows right away that what they have done is correct.
3. Challenges are balanced to skills.   We enjoy activities that are not easy, but are not beyond our capabilities.  To simple a task results in boredom, and too difficult a task results in frustration.
4. The mind is focused on action.  In most everyday activities, we are thinking of one thing while doing another.  In a flow activity, the mind is focused on the task.
5. Distractions are excluded.   Likewise, distraction is detrimental to the work – if a person who is attempting to do something is even momentarily distracted, he will be unable to succeed.   Flow often exists in individuals who are not troubled or anxious about other things.
6. Failure is an option.   When we are too obsessed with achieving a specific outcome, our focus is on the product and not the task and there is constant fear and worry of not achieving the desired outcome, which itself becomes a distraction.
7. Self-consciousness disappears.   The person may become a distraction to his own work, as acute self-awareness is a burden.  There is often the expression that a man merges with the tools he uses to do the work, and the object he is acting upon fills  his whole consciousness.
8. Time distorts.  During a flow activity, the actor loses the sense of time.  Hours may pass, but to the actor feels that it has been only minutes.  In some instances, the opposite occurs: a person may be so intent on the granular details of a specific action that time seems distended.
9. Activities become autotelic (an end in themselves).   The actor enjoys doing the activity, rather than being motivated by the desire to achieve some extrinsic goal, even the one resulting directly to his activity.

I have the sense that much of this work is applicable to customer experience.   Though commercial site operators may balk at some of them (“failure is an option” means accepting some interested prospects may fail to purchase – which is entirely unacceptable, though likely quite true) and others may be beyond our control (the notion of time distortion is likely dependent on the subject’s intensity of interest), there’s a lot here to work with.