1. Set clear goals
2. Provide immediate feedback
3. Maximize efficiency
4. Allow for discovery

One example, under the heading “Maximize efficiency”:

Google Reader has several features that make it feel fast and effortless. Perhaps the best example is the “endless scroll.” It eliminates the need for pagination by fetching new articles as you scroll down the page so that you can read all the articles in a tag or feed without ever clicking to go to a new page. The user never has to disrupt their reading by clicking a link to the next page.

Another way that Google Reader ensures efficiency is through the email feature which, when clicked, appears directly below the article and allows you to send a story to a friend without losing your place. Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.

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A friend recently pointed us to an article by Nirmala, author of “Nothing Personal: Seeing Beyond the Illusion of a Separate Self”. Nirmala describes the strange phenomenon, familiar to creative people, of everything suddenly becoming easy - when one is able to stop trying to make things happen and instead just accept what happens “by itself”. He says that gratitude is the frame of mind that invites this phenomenon to occur. An excerpt:

In desiring what is, you step into where it is going; you step into the flow, into this mysteriously unfolding, ever-new moment. This powerful force called desire can either cause all the suffering in the world or—when turned to right here, right now—become this incredible power for flow, for beingness.

When that starts to happen, it is easy to get overly intrigued with that. It becomes this really fun thing—to apparently be manifesting something. It’s actually a complete mystery how those two things are connected: your wanting something to happen and it happening. It would be just as accurate to say that it is a form of premonition. So, when that flow is happening, the temptation can be to get so intrigued with that, that you start to play with that. The second you get intrigued with how things are getting easier, it’s like saying I’m grateful for the Truth as long as this flow-thing is happening. It’s easy to be grateful when you’re in the flow, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but if you get too interested in it and turn away from this mysterious meeting of the moment with gratitude, then your gratitude is no longer unconditional.

You have to be willing to throw your heart open with gratitude even before there’s any sense of the flow and even when flow is a distant memory. That’s where the life is, where the juice is coming from—even where this apparent flow is coming from. And the other thing about flow is that sometimes the shortest path between two points is through Hell, and that’s the way flow is going to go sometimes. So, if you have the idea that flow looks like a flat tire being fixed really fast, you might discover that flow has a very different idea about how long you will be on the side of the highway and how late you will be to your next appointmenet.

More at wheniawoke.com…

(Click to see a larger image.)

I found that it was so intuitively designed that I was able to learn the basics in an hour or so. And shortly after that I was using it to generate and explore new ideas faster and more easily than I could have otherwise. Helping non-illustrators to produce usable 3D sketches is just part of what FrameForge Studio does. Using FrameForge you can, among other things:

• Build virtual sets and backgrounds
• Populate
  
  them with virtual characters
• Move, dress and modify your characters
• Pan, tilt, crane, dolly and zoom one or more virtual cameras
• Try different virtual lenses
• Manage your shot sequence
• Manage your script and marry it to your shots to create a finished storyboard

It’s all thoughtfully designed to support real-world shooting. For example, as the makers of FrameForge emphasize, the storyboard images it produces are optically correct, as they would be seen through a real camera of the type modeled by your virtual camera:

I say it’s a nominee for a Flow Award.

So wouldn’t it be strange if many of today’s musical instruments were designed to prevent or destroy flow? According to a recently convened group of audio experts, that seems to be the case. The group issued a report stating that most electronic musical instruments are complicated, confusing, and just plain frustrating to use—and when it comes to supporting flow, they compare poorly to instruments that have been around for centuries.

More at O’Reilly Digital Media…

Flow is the experience of being blissfully lost in a creative activity. It’s an experience that many people identify with happiness itself. Some technology supports flow; much does not. This site and community are intended to encourage the first kind.