Behavioral product strategist and gamification designer. This is my public hypertext notebook, sharing my thinking in motion at various stages of development.

Home

Failure state

Index

Intentionally design for failure statesIntentionally design for failure states
A failure state is when users fail to reach their goal in some way. In goal striving, it is inevitable that the user will experience failure states, because a goal is by definition a discrepancy between your desired state of reality and your present state. If we didn't have failure states, the Intention-Behavior Gap There tends to be a gap between what people intend to do and what they actually do, Sheeran & Webb 2016::rmn would be a non-issue (rather than one of the hardest problems in t...

Difficulty MatchingDifficulty Matching
The emotional experience of Flow

A flow state is often characterized as optimal human experience. It’s an experience where you are fully focused and energized in what you’re doing, often experiencing a high level of creativity and losing track of time.



The general emotional experience that is being described here is that when a task is too challenging for a user’s current level of ability, they’ll get frustrated and give up. Alternatively, when the task is far too easy, they are likely t...