haveuheard's favorite 09/01/2008

• Design for Emotion and Flow - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

  tags: flow, design, arrows, emotion, ux, usability, paper

  • The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described focused attention as “psychic energy”. Like energy in the traditional sense, no work can be done without it, and through work that energy is consumed. Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience.
  • flow state can be classified into the three areas; 1. Causes of Flow 2. Characteristics of Flow 3. Consequences of Flow (Novak, Hoffman and Yung, 1999)
  • • A clear goal
    • Immediate feedback on the success of attempts to reach that goal
    • A challenge you’re confident you have the skills to handle
  • • Loss of consciousness of self
    • Distortions in the perception of time
    • Activity is perceived as intrinsically rewarding

  • The main elements designers can control are:

    • Providing immediate feedback
    • Balancing the perception of challenge against users’ skills
  • he user navigates to accomplish a task, like seeking information on a particular topic or surfing for fun
  • The opportunities for action are balanced with the user’s ability. At a basic level, this is accomplished by providing an uncluttered interface and eliminating unnecessary information to limit the user’s cognitive load.
  • receives quick, sensory feedback in the form of a visual shift and/or sound from links, buttons, menus, or other navigation items.
  • Flow and Emotion
  • Flow tends to occur in situations with higher levels of challenge and skill. If the challenge is too easy, or user skill levels are very high, anxiety can be so low that there is little motivation to do anything. This level of activation or “arousal” in the body is the physiological (i.e., bodily) dimension of emotion. The level of arousal affects how intensely we experience a given emotion, and intense emotions demand our attention. In evolutionary terms,
  • Both pleasant and unpleasant objects and experiences can increase arousal levels. Frustration and the excitement both increase arousal levels. So do large images, bright colors, and high contrast (van Gorp, 2006).

  • Goal-directed vs. Experiential Use

    Different motivations for using a website require different designs to facilitate flow (Novak, Hoffman and Yung 1996). Novice users tend to see the Internet in a playful way, while more experienced users tend to view the Internet in a more utilitarian way (King 2003).

  • Novice Users – Experiential use

    • Less challenging
    • More exploratory
    • Entertainment-oriented

  • Experienced Users – tendency towards Goal-directed use

    • More challenging
    • Less exploratory
    • Connected with tasks (e.g. research, work and shopping)

• The Future of the Desktop - ReadWriteWeb - Annotated

  tags: desktop, web2.0, future, computing, readwriteweb, web, os, technology

  • bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.
    • This suggests that the point of filtering through an enormous amount of information, or with "leveraging the collective intelligence" is to get ahead, in business, presumably. But this model of competition seems as old-fashioned as the filing cabinet model of data storage. - post by braddo
  • The Future of the Desktop
    • Lots of hand waving, no hard facts. Nice read, thought provoking, it points how the future could be, but not entirely convincing. - post by dmolla
  • People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC
  • The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.
  • there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.
  • This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.
  • . Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it.
  • If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives.
  • As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.)