Flow | This Emotional Life "Csikszenmihalyi defines flow as the point where your challenges meet your skills.
Painters, athletes, musicians, computer programmers, financial traders, writers all describe themselves as regularly experiencing flow. If you look at the flow chart, you can see that
flow can happen at high skills and high challenge... or at low skills and low challenge..."
...If a user's skill exceeds the challenge of the experience, they will become bored.
...if the challenge exceeds the participant's skill, they will suffer anxiety.
...an optimal user experience is illustrated in the "Flow Channel" as the squiggly line.
This line demonstrates the experience described above where a user is challenged to a high degree with new experiences, and then given an opportunity to demonstrate and master the skill of that experience, before given a completely new challenge to conquer."
The metaphor of "FLOW" is related to "RIVER". Anxiety is like a hard rock, that blocks progress of water, forcing to change its way
and prevents direct progress to its destination.
Boredom is like a flat terrain, where water becomes a marsh,
with no progress and meaningful changes.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in city called "river" (Rijeka in Croatian, Fiume inItalian),
that used to be part of Italy, and now is part of Croatia.
The river separated fast downtown port city from slow suburbs.