Product Flow — What Product Management can learn from Psychology
Did you ever download a new app to quickly check it out before going to bed, yet ended up spending hours with your new digital companion? You could go to bed now, but as you are not feeling tired at all why not try out one more feature…
Maybe you’ve never been the victim of “sleep deprivation by product excitement”, but I am sure the feeling of forgetting about time and space when using your phone sounds familiar. It turns out that this excitement-laden state of mind has a name in psychology — it’s referred to as Flow.
Applying the concept of Flow to product management can help create immersive, joyful and sometimes even sleep depriving product experiences.
What is Flow?
It started back in the 1970’s, when psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi was fascinated with the performance of star athletes and artists. The researcher wanted to understand what it was, that enabled the individuals to rise to peak performance. The result was Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow model shown below.
Csikszentmihalyi discovered that (1) a person’s skill and (2) the difficulty of a task at hand interact with each other resulting in a different emotional and cognitive state. The most desirable state, our sweet spot from the beginning, is entered when skill and difficulty are proportionate. Csikszentmihalyi termed this state Flow, which is best described with the following words:
“Flow, is the mental state (…) in which a person (…) is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment” — Wikipedia.org
This feeling of Flow is not a constant, meaning that if a person’s skill level improves, the challenge of the task needs to increase accordingly to keep the individual in Flow.
When skill and difficulty do not match up it happens that people end up in a state of boredom (no challenge) or anxiety (too much challenge).
Building up on Csikszentmihalyi’s research, the Flow concept is today used in numerous professions to explain and manage peoples behavior. One example is from Human Resources where employee performance is improved by aligning responsibilities and skill level to prevent boredom or high pressure.
Flow in Product Management
Applying Flow to the domain of Product Management is, just like with other disciplines, invaluable for improving experiences. Users that are in Product Flow will handle your product with ease and energized focus resulting in numerous joy-filled returns to your service.
The Flow concept puts peoples in the center spot, making it very compatible with idea of user-centric product development. What’s new to the game is a unique mix of looking at user journeys from two angles:
- Flow is the right mix — Difficulty of the task at hand needs to match with the user’s skill level to prevent boredom or frustration.
- Flow is temporary — (User)satisfaction is not a constant. If your user’s skills change over time, so needs your product to prevent boredom
Putting a ✔ on product value is a crucial step in the product development process (Product/Market Fit). However, it can also hide the complexity in delivering this value later on. Here, the Flow concept kicks in to show that creating product experiences is a multidimensional approach. User expectations and needs change and we need to cater to this with versatile product experiences that ensure Product Flow along the user journey.
A magnificent example of a product that had me in Product Flow before I even knew the term, is my beloved Spotify. My early hours with the service were pleasant and exciting — from the easy sign-up with Facebook over to listening to my first song and oh-so-much music to explore. Over time, I tiptoed deeper into the offering, creating lists and checking similar artists. Fast forward to today and I have a premium account with ad free music, curated lists and highly personalized radio stations that help me discover great artists every week. Over time Spotify gracefully managed to pull me into the services making it feel just right to where I was in my user journey. Like the songs of my favorite artists, Spotify kept me in (Product)Flow.
So how can we achieve similar success as the Swedish music streaming Behemoth?
Introducing the Product Flow Framework
The Product Flow Framework aims at helping you in finding Product Flow with your product. It does so by providing a way to visualize your user journey to then structure and identify measures, challenges and potential weak spots in keeping users engaged over time.
The framework builds up on the existing Flow concept adding some product management specifics to it. You see that Product Flow becomes the symbiosis of a user’s product proficiency and the perceived opportunities or challenges that a product offers. For simplicity reasons Product Flow is visualized as one continues state. However, as with the original concept of Flow it is very common for people to drop in and out as they move along.
When applying the Product Flow framework these 5 questions will help you with getting started:
- Am I handling beginners accordingly? — When users are “fresh through the door” it is important to not overwhelm them. Otherwise, they will be right back out the same way they came in. With low product proficiency, the tolerance level for product challenges is low as well. Therefore, a proper onboarding strategy is important to carefully and gracefully introduce a user to your service.
Example: A product that mastered the process of onboarding is Slack by letting you hop into the product experience with ease right away, introducing more difficult product features later as you move along. - Am I overwhelming the user? — Less is more. Check how you are doing presenting information and product functionality to users. If you are doing too much here you run into the risk of creating a feeling of frustration rather then excitement — 12 click areas on a mobile screen anyone?
Example: A good example of an app that should ask the above question is Evernote. I use the service frequently, but opening the mobile app still leaves me with a mix of confusion and exhaustion caused by the overload of things on the screen. Needless to say, if you can find a way to prevent these feelings, you have a far larger chance of users sticking around.
For those of you interested in learning more on this issue of cognitive load, Kathy Sierra did a great job in this post here.
- Is my product experience intuitiv? — If the steps to perform important actions are not straightforward and take a long time, you are creating a product challenge that is far too high to still allow for a pleasant experience.
Example: Your banking app of choice - Is my product challenging the user (if yes, is it maybe too much?) — A little challenge never hurt anyone… and it is also vital to prevent boredom. A new feature to check out, a functionality to master, and some delightful animations to stumble upon — All the above are things that keep users engaged, allowing them to grow on your product experience like a newly promoted manager does with greater responsibilities. Be aware though to always strike a balance to not make your product experience too challenging. You’ll risk making your user feel like a startup founder who went from 5 to 500 employees in 5 weeks.
Example: Spotify always offers some challenges for a user to master, like getting rid of those bands I do not like from my personalized radios or creating shared playlists for a summer party. You always know where you are and it is not getting too much to handle. For the opposite experience you can check the examples from the last two bullets. - Will heavy users get bored? — Your most valuable users are the ones that are proficient with your product and come back frequently. It is crucial to think about new product opportunities to keep your heavy users engaged to prevent boredom. Some products have it easier than others by nature of their business. News apps will always be able to provide curiosity sparking, fresh and new content. With other, more service oriented apps this becomes more difficult, yet as the following example proofs not impossible.
Example: Wunderlist is a to-do-list app that helps you organize your life in lists. I’ve been using the service daily for a while now. So what did it take to further engage a heavy user like me, with tons of different lists already? If a tool is so deeply embedded into your life, you run into limitations at some point if you use it in isolation. For this, Wunderlist offers you the ability to have shared lists with others, which expands the scope of usage significantly. For example, you can have shared shopping lists with your significant other (go try, it’s awesome!). The additional use cases prevented me from feeling bored, even after using the product for a while.
Flow On
You should now have a good idea of what Flow is and how to apply it to product management. That means, you are all set up for the fun part: Applying Flow-Thinking to your own products to spark user excitement or to prevent the opposite.
Or maybe you have been building Flow-Moments all along without knowing the concept — now you have the matching framework that can help you dig deeper into understanding your user and communicate to stakeholders what you are aiming for.
Strive for giving your users some joyful, sleep-deprived nights with your product, they will thank you for it.
Additional Reads
- For those who want to dig deeper into the concept of Flow I recommend Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s book on the topic:
Also, here is a video from a Ted Talk he did in 2004:
- As it often happens, the gaming industry is already 5 steps ahead with adapting valuable ideas. Sean Baron wrote this excellent study on how the concept of Flow can be leveraged in game design. Check the reading list at the end of the article too for some great reads.
