This article looks at the psychological concept of flow, how important it is to web design and the best way to design sites with flow in mind. Without this critical concept in place many users will get bored and their attention will leak away from your site resulting in a lost visitor.

What is Flow?

The important thing to understand about flow as a mental concept is that the way it works is universal but different individuals feel and perceive it in different ways and situations. Some types of flow can be experienced by almost anyone (the plot pacing in a movie or the design in your website) but flow can also be a more personal experience such as writing a good passage of text in quick succession for a copywriter or hitting every note perfect while playing piano.

The concept of flow was first introduced (academically) by a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He said there is a state of concentration that can be achieved when attention, motivation and situation are all optimised which come together to result in a large amount of productive effort. The concept of flow is very similar to modern sayings such as "in the zone" or "on a roll".

Getting people into this mental state on a website you are designing is important as it will allow the user to look at your entire site and pick up whatever information you are offering and lead to a more likely conversion whether that be a sale, enquiry or just lasting visit.

Putting flow inside web design is all about making things as easy as possible for a visitor or potential customer and this can be looked at in several ways, goals, efficiency, feedback and discovery.

Goals

The first concept of goals is critically important for all websites and especially for retail. The flow of your site should take your user through relevant information and to your goal so deciding what that is should be your first step. After you have decided this you need to set up smaller goals for the user on each page. This could be something as simple as choosing whether to tick a box or as complicated as entering their payment details as long as the goal is clear the flow will be maintained.

Be sure to choose the correct copy for instructions, it should be clear what the person has to do but its easy to come off as sarcastic or condescending when giving orders so make it as friendly as possible. Also I recommend you keep a steady style throughout your copy instead of dotting in and out of formality.

Efficiency

Efficiency is also very important in a sites design. Incorporating basic navigation and optimising your sites performance will keep users from becoming bored with menial tasks such as click through and looking for the right page. As you may already know it’s wise to minimise the pages a user has to go through to complete the goal, modern web users get bored and click away very quickly if they have to go through 10 pages of terms before they even start a task.

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