Your working environment has a big impact on your productivity, creativity and happiness. And good user experiences follow the same rules.

The interruptions caused by email and other digital communications reduce your IQ by up to 10 points, and cost large corporations UD$1m in revenue per annum. They also make people unhappy. Among many corporations, Intel has been running a "quiet time" initiative, where every Tuesday morning is set aside for quiet thinking only. No email, no IM, no phone calls, even.

On the flip side, I found interesting research about how corporate environments that provide clear goals, facilitate progress and praise success make people happier, more creative and more productive.

It struck me that most of this is linked to the concept of Flow, proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a state of optimal experience (very closely linked to happiness). If you've ever looked up at the clock and realised that an hour or two has rushed past unexpectedly, chances are you were in a state of Flow.

Flow is frequently caused by having clear and worthwhile goals, making visible progress towards those goals, and being appropriately challenged as you go. Almost exactly like that description of the happy and productive working environment.

But how many times have you sat down at your desk expecting to make rewarding progress, only to realise that you have a pile of unread email? Suddenly you're wading through unexpected issues and problems, and your original goal for the day is pushed further away. That's a recipe for no flow, and a feeling of frustration. No wonder the Intel pilot group look forward to Tuesday mornings.

Happy interaction

So, if you're a manager, you need to be shaping your team or organisation to work in a Flow-inducing way.

If you're an interaction designer, you need to design interfaces to help your users experience Flow. Three fairly plain lessons:

• Don't interrupt your users. People using computers are goal directed - they're online to get a task done. Excessive confirmation dialogs cause frustration. Interstitial and pop-up ads are worse. Flash intros are, mercifully, a thing of the past.  And perhaps the cardinal sin is emailing your customers too much. Why any brand would want to be associated with these negative, frustration-causing events is a mystery to me. "Are users stupid?" some unenlightened designers have been heard to ask. Well, if you keep interrupting them, you're reducing their IQ.
• Help your users to accept new ideas. Innovation is a hot topic for corporations looking for an edge. Helping your customers to innovate makes them happy too. Blogger.com helps new users understand blogging and create a blog in astoundingly simple steps. Google Adwords suggests new products and services that are specifically selected to be relevant to the user's goal. Amazon does the same, and also keeps many of it recommendations for after you've made some productive steps towards your goal - it recommends most stuff when you add to basket and when you complete a purchase.
• Help your users to think creatively. A lot of Web2.0, and the latest thinking in UCD, is about helping people to express themselves by building or creating something. Myspace and Facebook pages and relationships are a labour of love for some. Family trees are loving crafted in Geni. Photobox lets you craft beautiful paper photo albums using custom software. All Flow activities, where users make clear progress towards desirable goals, and learn something on the way.

To be effective interaction designers, we need to be happiness experts. And because the organisation behind the interface will always show through, we need to be happy and work in happy places. Now that's a goal worth working towards.

Ian Worley, Flow's Director of User Experience, was recently on a panel at the Media Futures 2008 conference in London. He was talking about the value of research in the design process: it lets you innovate with your eyes open.

Here's Ian's post...

Research is the foundation of all innovation. Design teams that augment their thinking with insights and feedback from their target audience will deliver better results. Be it ethnographic observation, participatory design or usability testing, research provides the stimulus and the constraints for a real (and really successful) innovation process.

What is the creative process? Here's one definition: it's about transforming what you observe in the world into meaningful and valuable artefacts through play, experimentation and feedback. What we call design research is really just a formalisation of those observation and feedback elements.

New technology is transforming the media. It's changing how people create, access, collect, share and consume information and entertainment. Ethnographic and participatory research are really valuable tools for understanding these changes. They uncover the nuances of new attitudes and behaviours at different social and cultural scales from individuals to communities.

If your organisation is hoping to turn a profit in this new media landscape, you need a deep understanding of the new ways people are consuming media now. Then you can design how they will consume it tomorrow.

Media Futures 2008 was an interesting day, a great opportunity and an amazing collection of people.

• Flickr set of the conference by Nico MacDonald
• More about the Media Futures 2008 conference

Flow helped the Training and Development Agency to build a user experience roadmap for their website and create a user experience scorecard for measuring its success.

Ethnographic approaches, such as contextual enquiry and experience labs, help organisations understand their target customers needs, behaviours and motivations. To get really insightful discoveries, researchers immerse themselves as deeply as possible in the lives or jobs of a limited sample of target users and try to discover what those people really think and need.

On the other end of the spectrum lies automated quantitative usability testing. Here you never see your users at all. But you get accurate measurements of how successful they are at achieving key tasks on your site. Gaining a quantitative understanding of your website's performance lets you chart your site's improvement over time, and identify where it could be performing better.

Ethnographic techniques tell you what your users want to do. Quantitative testing tells you how many of them are managing to do it.

And often, successful UX strategies will combine the two. Our project for the TDA did.

Building a UX strategy for the TDA

We began by conducting contextual research with people from the TDA's 7 target user groups - including teachers, support staff and school leaders. We gathered stories of actual experiences that they had lived through, and the sequences of activities they had engaged in. We also played some simple participatory design games with them to bring out ideas for the "ideal" TDA website.

With a separate sample, we usability tested the existing website. Using a huge quantity of sticky notes, the researchers put all the data together and analysed it. They uncovered a selection of 70-80 tasks that the different target groups needed to perform on the website. (We also discovered that there were really only 4 groups with different needs, rather than 7).

Next came a "task matrix". For each task, we identified:

• The audiences who do it
• Related tasks or sub tasks
• Triggers that cause someone to engage in the task at a certain point (events like assessments, deadlines, changes in staff)
• Target web pages where useful information would be found.

Straight away, this let us see where there were improvements to be made. If we struggled to find suitable target pages, or if the information or findability of a target page seemed poor, we knew we had an opportunity to improve things.

To take us beyond expert opinion, we also used the TDA's web analytics data. We checked how many people were visiting each target page, and assessed that figure in relation to task importance and audience group size. That gave us additional evidence about whether pages we easy to find or not.

Finally, we worked with stakeholders to assess the effort needed to improve the website for each task. Plotting each task on a chart of priority versus effort (for users and for the organisation) gave us a solid roadmap: small, high-value changes first; larger changes later.

User experience scorecard

To make it easier to measure and chart improvement in the site's UX, we set up a user experience scorecard using UserZoom.

UserZoom performs automated remote usability testing. It asks a quantitative sample of target users to try doing certain tasks, gathers clickstream data and quizzes them to check comprehension and attitude. The scorecard treats user tasks as key performance indicators of the site's user experience. The TDA is running benchmark UserZoom studies every six months, and the results are being fed onto an interactive dashboard.

The scorecard will help the TDA team to monitor the impact on the user experience as they work through the steps on their UX roadmap.

Flow's team: Mary Henley, Anthony Mace, Claire Mitchell, Leisa Reichelt, Sarah Herman, Pav Chahal, Nick Bowmast, Vanessa Kirby, conducted the research. Karen Wall looked after the client relationship.

If if the 1st Gen iPhone was so "bad" - what was Apple thinking when they launched it?

There was much complaining about the shortcomings of the iPhone 1.0. And vocal user complaints are not usually a great recipe for a popular product and strong sales. In fact often, companies that rush products out to be "first to market" end up having their lunch eaten by products that arrive a little later, but offer a better UX. Apple themselves demonstrated with the ipod that late-comers can steal the the show by being "best-to-market."

Here are 5 reasons I can think of why Apple launched a "bad" product, braved all that negative publicity, and gave companies like Samsung and HTC a chance to take a shot at them.

1. Launch simple products first.

Apple like everyone else had to launch a version 1.0. Business reality and human psychology demand it. At some point you have to get something out the door becfore you run out of cash or go insane. iPhone 1.0 was a product of controlled project scope.

2. Get feedback from beta testers

Getting live market feedback works well - but mostly with early adopters. So perhaps Apple didn't want go mainstream yet. Did they elect to keep sales constrained and stay with the iPhone *BETA crowd until they had perfected the product?

3. Move the focus to UX

The iPhone caused a stir because it moved the focus to a different aspect of the mobile UX. Were Apple deliberately saying "it's not about hardware. Stop competing on hardware. This new phone is all about the user experience." So in a way, the hardware shortcomings drew attention to the UX. People complaining about missing hardware could be accused of "missing the point/having no vision" - and frequently were.

4. No competitors stand a chance anyway

Apple decided it didn't matter if their product wasn't perfect, because they were confident that none of the existing mobile manufacturers could get their act together to compete on Apple's UX turf nearly fast enough. Efforts from HTC and Samsung were hardly mind-blowing. Nokia's device is still in development.

And realistically, that wasn't hard to predict. For traditional electronics companies to try to squeeze into the Apple mold seems to be all but impossible. So Apple put their money where their mouth was and went first to market with an incomplete product. They knew they would get away with it.

5. And now they can generate more buzz by launching version 2.

All publicity is good publicity.

Are people going to buy iPhone2? Some more will. I suspect that question doesn't matter to Apple too much. We're still, arguably, in beta 2. One more release and it's going to get interesting.

Tower Bridge has joined the ranks of an increasing number of intelligent objects that can tell us things about themselves.

My colleague David Whittle uncovered this beautiful little story: Tower Bridge is now on Twitter. Effecitvely the bridge is keeping its own micro blog of its activitiy and notifying anyone who cares to subscribe about what it is doing.

This makes Tower Bridge into a spime - an object that is in some why aware of its's own position in space and time, and able to report it to interested parties.

You've found your keys

Spimes offer a lovely way to connect the world of physical objects to the information flow of the Internet.

Lost your keys? If they were spime keys, you could Google for them.

Lent a book to someone but can't remember who? If it were a spime you could Google for who had it. And maybe even if they had read it.

Bruce Sterling describes a vision of the future where product designers can iteratively enhance spime-products using spime data about when and where the products were used. Kind of like Web analytics but for physical products too. (Fascinating and useful for the designers, but so replacement for experience labs and other ethno techniques. Why? Because a spime will still not be able to capture and relay its users intentions, motivations and desires.)

Spimes and spime kludges

You can't yet google your keys or get analytics about how someone used their new shoes. But there is already a lot of spime-like stuff out there, beyond Tower Bridge.

Track packages: Express parcels are spimes. They have barcodes and RFID tags, so that you can track where they have got to. There was furore a few years back over the idea of RFID tags embedded in clothes to help with inventory tracking. If you forgot to remove the tags, then conceivably, people could track you!

Find children: Mobile phones and cool sneakers with GPS are being used to help worried parents keep track of their children. (No need to implant the chip in the child, just give them a kid-friendly phone or trendy sneakers and they'll take their treasure with them everywhere).

And this low tech but ingenious approach is helping people find lost digital cameras. If you find a lost camera, just mail four pictures from it to the Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures blog, and maybe the owner will find them and claim it.

Spime your stuff now

If you own something that you feel need to be searchable by others, Google can help. Google Base lets you store any information about anything online now, so that others can search for it. But unless you can find a way to update the information in real time, then your object won't yet be a spime.

Know any other good spimes? Do tell.

The Transport for London website team's dedication to user centred design has helped make their site a leader in the public sector.

A recent report from the Public Accounts Committee has been critical of the way that UK government websites are designed and managed. But TfL.gov.uk, the Transport for London website, was one of the few cited for good practice and performance. It's no real surprise: the TfL team really understand the value of listening to customers, and designing for their needs.

Sometimes, we're pleased to say, TfL hire Flow to help them.

What London travellers really need

TFL's flagship offering is Journey Planner. Back in 2006, we helped TFL research and design the mobile travel alerts element of the service. Designing personalisation features for a website is never easy - because most of the time, people don't want to personalise. We all just want the website to do what we need with minimal effort.

Flow ran experience labs: one-to-one sessions with a range of different people. The lab sessions focussed on digging out the reality of London travellers' needs, motivations and behaviours.

A key technique was retrospective accounts: we gathered detailed stories about what people really did in specific situations. So rather than asking "what do you think about travel in London" we asked things like "Tell me how you got to this interview today," and "tell me about the last time something went wrong with your commute to work." To keep the conversation fun and manageable, we also collaborated with the respondents to create pictures, lists and timelines using sticky notes and marker pens.

Once we understood user needs, we could identify a service that people would really like. The travel alerts system lets you identify the routes you are interested in (typically the ones you commute on every day), and get travel alerts for those routes at specific times. We defined the concept, worked with TFL to create wireframes, then fine tuned them with two iterations of usability testing.

TfL personalised travel alerts: Prototype and live site.

Practical commitment to customers

Since then we've helped TfL research and optimise all sorts of things from the Oyster Fastload process to the London Transport museum website. And since communicating with travellers is a multichannel activity we've even run iterative usability testing in London Underground stations - quite a challenge.

Now approaching...

Flow is now working with TfL on a strategic project to map out the future for the website, and we're basing the process on user research.

To improve on the experience labs methodology, we're asking our research subjects to fill in diaries. We're catching reports of travel experiences while people are travelling, then following up on the details in the lab afterwards. From there we'll be using a scenario-based approach to map out what people's travel experience and identify the TfL website's optimal role.

The finished site will offer London's travellers an even more useful, usable and appealing travel experience.

Flow Interactive is hiring. I thought maybe some insights into life at Flow might be interesting for everyone - and might persuade some of you to come work with us. If you've got a talent for user-centred design, you'll love it here.

Here are some quick snapshots.

Here are some Flow consultants eating cake. This happens every Friday. It's a great opportunity to exchange tips and ideas, as well as to wind down for the weekend. We also have a quarterly internal mini-conference called Holy Flowday, and weekly lunchtime sessions called Flowlite. It's a great way to learn.

Also note:

• Football table: Esential kit for every Clerkenwell office.
• Large shelf of UX books in the background: Not so often seen in Clerkenwell offices. We really value knowledge, innovation and best practice - not just cake and football.

Here's a usability lab. We have three of them in various configurations and with good quality microphones and cameras, plus Morae or DVD recording. You can also see the magic mirror behind which observers can lurk. There is no better way to prove the value of user-centred design to a product team than letting them watch real target users trying out the design ideas. Project politics tends to evaporate.

We also use these rooms for conducting "experience labs" - sessions where we use all sorts of techniques and games to help target users show us the reality of their needs and behaviours. The very the best way to work out what people need is often go and hang out with them. Contextual enquiry and ethnography are all about getting out of the lab - a very popular activity with Flowsters.

And finally, here's a project war-room. Research and design generate a lot of facts and ideas that need to be marshalled, soaked up and communicated. Flowsters are obsessed with using sticky notes for this purpose. So we do have a lot of project war rooms where individuals and groups can surround themselves with their work. We're convinced that this technique leads to better quality results.

So, fancy working at Flow? It's a chance to work on a real diversity of projects for top-grade clients, and do design the way it should be done. With a team who are passionate about UCD. In a great space. For a good salary. UCD heaven.

• More about Flow's work
• More about Flow's people
• More about the vacancies, and how to apply
  

The web still has the capacity to delight and disappoint me in equal measure. Recently I experienced examples of both extremes on exactly the same day.

Extremely good

Threadless  sells t-shirts, and sells them well. Limited edition t-shirts, designed by anyone who wants to design them, and voted into production by the Threadless community.

On their site, as on many others, I often use the basket as an ongoing wish-list, collecting the stuff that I might buy if and when the conditions are right. But if you do this with Threadless' basket you stand a fair chance of missing one of those limited edition t-shirts. So Threadless have come up with a nice email to let you know when this is going to happen, and here it is:

The call to action is strong, the tone of voice cheeky and familiar but still polite ("thank you from your pals at Threadless.com”).

Extremely…. well, bad

That very same day I received a film and ink pack for my photo printer; I'd ordered them online having done a little research and ordered a pack of 100. However the pack that I got in the post was only a 50. Frustrated, I telephoned the supplier:

10 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
20 Me: "CO3548"
30 Man on the phone: "that's the 50 pack"
40 Me: "Well your website and the email confirmation says its the 100 pack"
50 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
60 GOTO 20
RUN

In the end the query was passed on to someone else and while waiting for the call back I thought I'd check my order online and log into my account. Perhaps I was flustered from the phone conversation, but I made a mistake with my password. This is what greeted me:

Okay so now I'm not just a little miffed but in fact somewhat teed off, let's just read this out loud together:

"Internet fraud is a serious offence..."
"we record IP addresses to help trace the location of fraudulent transaction attempts"

Wow

Adding insult to injury, I now have the wrong item in my hands and I feel just a little bit criminalised to boot. I waited in anticipation of the call to come and the website left me in quite a self-righteous, unhappy customer kind of state.

In the end the call back was really good: there was an apology, a reason (well an excuse - data entry error), and they sent me the right product out in exchange. Even so, the experience was unsatisfactory and inconvenient and I'm unlikely to use the site again.

If only the site could have reflected their (eventually) helpful manner in resolving the problem; and if only Threadless sold photo paper.

We were excited to hear the that the National Express East Coast website has been short-listed for the National Transport Awards. We have to wait until July to find out if we've won though.

Flow worked Atos Origin and Splendid on the project. We know customers love it - let's hope the judges do too.