Design for Optimal Experience

In life we're often told that the best things are the sort of halfway houses, the sort of Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold. That's not always true; There are some times when it's important – the extremes are important. However, there are a number of situations where these middle points can actually be the best point to go, particularly in terms of emotional reactions.

One of the earliest things to be studied in this area is what's called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Now, this came from work by Yerkes and Dodson. But in fact, the curve, the actual curve is something that was drawn much later. And you've probably seen variants of this for different things. The idea of this, you look at the level of arousal somebody has, whether they have very low arousal, you know, half asleep.

Or whether they have very high arousal and are bouncing all over the place. Super chilled versus super active. And then you look at *performance* and different kinds of performance this is applied to sometimes. Whether it’s straight efficiency, your ability to remember things. And what you tend to find is if people are at that sort of very laid back chill, sort of that thing, they don't perform that well. You know, just perhaps they're not motivated enough.

Perhaps they're just not attentive enough. If they’re hyper-stimulated and similarly often don't perform so well because perhaps they're not able to focus. And somewhere in the middle you get this golden point when you get optimal performance, that's somewhere between high arousal and low arousal. It's got just the right point. As I said, there are times when that isn't entirely true.

But it has a general truth to it, even though there are some exceptions. Another thing in this area is what's called *flow*. And this was coined as a term by Csikszentmihalyi, who studied high performers, people who were at the top of their profession. I mean, particularly this is looking at physical performance, but not just that. Rock climbing is the example that’s usually given as the sort of central example. [He] got a team of researchers who went out and interviewed

lots of people who were all at the peak of their relevant professions. And what he found was there was this *medium point* that was where people were functioning best. So if you imagine climbing a rock face. So I'm not an expert. Imagine you're a super-expert climber and you might go to the kind of rocks that I might feel comfortable on, and it might be like walking up a staircase to you.

Not very exciting at all. However, imagine now it's me and I was on a beach. I got cut off by the water coming in. I have to climb a cliff and this is way beyond anything I feel happy [about]. I'm just scared that I'm going to die. That's not going to be an optimal experience. And there's this point in between, between in one sense, sort of constant fear for your life and the other, just being bored.

It needn’t be fear for your life. It might be fear that you're going to fail in some other way. It might be that you're doing a mathematics test and you just think you're going to make a complete fluff of it. It might be about writing. Now you’ve got to write [something]. Or you’ve got to produce a video and you're going to fluff it completely. So at one point, there's this anxiety that makes it too hard. You know, you can imagine if I'm really, really anxious as I'm doing this video, I won't... I’ll come out all stiff and not very engaged.

Or if I'm dead bored, it's probably not going to excite you much either. Somewhere between that is this point called flow. What happens is that somewhere between this extreme anxiety and boredom, when you're at the edge of your abilities, you reach out and you can, with a stretch, reach the points. You can grip those little edges that I would struggle, I wouldn't even realize were a hold. But they’re within your abilities to do. But you're at the edge of that. And then for people, things become *timeless*.

They get lost in the activity. If you know any developers or if you code yourself, you will know, you will have observed or know this feeling, this being lost in the code. You know, you're so engaged that suddenly you think, “Oh my goodness, is it 3:00 in the morning? I never noticed.” Flow. Again, there are times you might not want flow, but often it's a really productive point to be at.

In learning, also, there's a similar technique... A similar point that’s called the zone of proximal development. It was coined by Vygotsky and people from constructive learning theory. And this is perhaps important to know if you're designing an educational application like this one, but also in any user interface when you're expecting people to learn how to use it, for instance, over time.

And the idea is that if you're trying to learn something that's way outside your understanding, if I start to talk to you about some aspect of theoretical quantum mechanics, say, you'll just... It will mean nothing to you. I mean maybe for one or two of you it does. But for most of you, it won't help you at all. And you won't learn the thing I tell you, because it's so outside your experience, you can't connect it in to anything. The things we learn best are things that are just at the edge and beyond our current knowledge, because then we're able to connect them

into our existing knowledge, create a coherent, constructed whole, and therefore expand our knowledge outwards. One of the techniques you can use to encourage this is what's called *scaffolding*. And scaffolding is about things that help you to do the things you can't quite do on your own, but you can do with a little help. So the image is like a scaffold going on a building. You put scaffolding up while you're building the building. But once the building is built,

you can take it away. So it helps you construct the building, but then it can be removed. For physical things, if you've ever come across this, the wheels you put at the back of a bicycle to help a child learn. [They’re] positioned so that when you cycle well, you don't actually use them, because they get raised off the ground. And so what you can do is remove them after time. Or as a parent, you might have that situation of running alongside the child holding them. Or even just if they're climbing, standing below them, so if they fall, you catch them.

And all of this helps you to do something you couldn't do without it. You know, maybe you might have done times tables in school, where you learn multiplications and you have a table that you can look them up. But later learn them. Or maybe you look in a dictionary if you're learning a language and then later on don't have to use it because you can remember the words. So when you can design things that help people, you know, that might be about having very

rapid-to-access help in your system. So if there's a problem you just perhaps click the question mark, click the points on your interface and it tells you something about what it means. Or maybe just rollovers on a web page, where you would go over something and hover for a moment. You see the explanation. These are things that help you to do the task when you don't quite know what's what; but over time, if you do things quickly,  the little rollovers never have time to appear.

So this scaffold is things that later on might just fall away completely, after you've learned to do the thing that was at the edge of your understanding.