On What Makes an Enjoyable Experience

Csikszentmihayli is analyzing what makes life enjoyable in the hope that we might use that knowledge to live more satisfying lives. Drawing from years of his research, interviews, and questionnaires, he breaks down eight recurring characteristics of activities that people identify as enjoyable.

The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. (p.49)

Summarizing his list a little more succinctly, enjoyable experiences usually:

1. are challenging applications of a skill
2. completely absorb attention
3. provide clear goals
4. provide immediate feedback
5. reduce awareness of everyday life
6. allow for a sense of control over action
7. reduce awareness of self
8. reduce awareness of time

When we look at the list through the lens of interaction design, numbers 3 and 4 (clear goals and immediate feedback) are familiar and have, in fact, become pretty common principles of usability. They remind us of the importance of visibility into an interactive system for people to meaningfully interact with it.

Number 1 on the list sounds straightforward, but points to something subtle: enjoyable experiences are not necessarily easy or comfortable. The author makes this point early in the book:

Contrary to what we usually believe... the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. (p.3)

Experiences are most enjoyable when they ask something of our capabilities and put forward a task that is balanced against those capabilities (an idea that is detailed more explicitly in Csikszentmihayli’s model of flow).

Number 6 on the list also contains a subtle point, this time about agency. Csikszentmihyli notes that “what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations” (p.61). So, even if only over a narrow scope, we derive enjoyment from the ability to act on and shape the things around us. The point is not to grant people absolute control, but an opportunity for agency.

I see the remaining points on the list (2, 5, 7, 8) as related. Each describes the phenomenon of letting the rest of the world fall away when you are deeply involved in something. Where the other four items on the list are mechanisms that might be designed for, these four seem to describe the desired outcome of Csikszentmihayli’s optimal experience.

This list gives us a sense of the author’s ideal as a sort of deep involvement with our actions. I think it’s a good basic starting point when you are trying to design for engagement.

But Csikszentmihayli also recognizes that experiences that meet his criteria can have negative, obsessive, and isolating qualities to them.

The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self. But whether the consequence of any particular instance of flow is good in the larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria. (p.70)

Here, I see acknowledgment that while the flow model suggests mechanisms for engaging people, it doesn’t have as much to say about accounting for the broader context of interaction, something that designers need to be keenly aware of.