We’ve all heard the classic conundrum of businesses today – “Half of our Marketing efforts are working, we just don’t know which half”. Site Analytics strives to answer that statement by gathering data to allow business to align their message, media, offer and channel with their desired audience to optimize the results and return for the company.

However, in online business today, the conundrum has gotten much more complicated. Where does the analytics of the website end and analysis of the customer begin? While we construct our KPIs and dashboards to capture the successes of our campaigns, ad placement, engagement and conversions to measure the success of our company objectives, in the end isn’t the end goal really about the customer and the measurement their experiences and successes (or lack of them)?

Spending Growth on Customer Experience

In a recently published report ‘Customer Experience Spending Intensifies in 2008, by Megan Burns’, Forrester Research identified areas where North American business leaders are looking to focus their attention for 2008. In comparison to the previous year Forrester found some significant spending and planning increases, notably:

• 84% total increase in efforts to improve online usability
• 78% total increase to improve cross-channel interactions
• 80% total increase to make online interactions more enjoyable

While the research points to the continued growth of the analytics industry and covers increasing size of the customer experience budgets, another trend identified by Forrester drives the end focus of all the measurement back to the customer and their interpretation of success.

“We expect these trends to lead to more customer-centric cultures and processes by enabling firms to be more disciplined in their approach to customer experience…”

Why focus measurement on the Customer’s Experience?

The Internet channel is becoming a (if not the) primary channel for most businesses today and Ecommerce continues to grow with online growth rates significantly outpacing the offline growth rates in most industries. So why is Customer Experience a top spending focus for 2008 and why did almost all (91%) of executives surveyed in the Forrester research report say customer experience will be either very important or critical to their 2008 efforts?

Simple really… your customers are trying to complete their transactions, your site is letting them down, and they are switching to a competitor. And by the way, the results are getting worse instead of better.

Harris Interactive conducted the third annual survey of online consumer behavior, sponsored by Tealeaf®, and the findings were alarming:

• 9 out of 10 consumers experienced an issue that caused them to abandon a transaction
• 53% of users who experience website issues contact the company’s call/contact center to resolve but 49% of users who contact a company after experiencing a web-related issue were still unable to have that issue resolved.

The result of this poor customer experience translated into two immediate waves of online abandonment:

• 42% of users say they abandon or switch to a competitor when they experience even one online site issue
• 52% say they stop doing business with the company entirely, and 76% either stopped doing business entirely, decrease the amount of business they do, or lodged a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

The third wave is even more risky. This is the threat to your brand loyalty and long-term customer value as a result of the poor customer experience and inability to complete an online transaction. With continued growth in blogging, social networks and viral content, your site failures are broadcast to an increasingly receptive audience actively seeking unmitigated third party reviews.

Indicators of a poor customer experiences are not limited the obvious but still prevalent today: site errors messages, performance issues and broken links – but include functional and business process challenges, and issues centered on usability and site-design. Collectively, however, they all have one commonality— they all forced the consumer to abandon the transaction.

For the third year running, nearly 90% of users responded that they had experienced an issue that caused them to abandon a transaction. This rate of “failure” is extremely high and is not improving—in fact, it’s actually getting worse. Considering there are significantly more users and transactions every year, with a consistent rate of failure, the number of individuals and transactions adversely affected by issues each year is actually increasing.

The first threat (the “first wave” of abandonment) is very real, with 42% of users saying they abandon or switch when they experience even one issue. These users have little tolerance for failure today and that tolerance will only continue to decrease until leading ebusinesses focus their attention and budgets on improving the customer experience on the website and in the online support centers. Consumers expect the online channel to work as well as offline channels such as storefronts, branches, catalogs and agents with 82% saying they expected the online experience to be the same as the offline.

The second threat (the “second wave” of abandonment) is significant and is newly identified by the 2007 Harris Survey. The heightened rate of churn for online customers – with 52% saying they stop doing business with the company entirely and a full 76% who either stopped doing business entirely, decreased the amount of business they do with the company, or lodged a complaint with the Better Business Bureau is a serious threat to online businesses that demands that call/contact centers be equipped to handle the needs of online consumers, or risk losing them to competition permanently, since the tolerance for poor customer service after web-related issues is extremely low.

The third threat is just as challenging, and perhaps even more risky. This is the threat to your brand loyalty. One interesting example the survey identified is that the single most important factor to consumers in doing business online was website security. However, the survey also found site issues to seriously undermine consumer confidence, specifically relative to online security and privacy concerns.

While businesses today tighten belts and budgets for tough times ahead, Forrester expects metrics and executive attention to the customer’s experience to rise to top of mind, and budget. Forrester addressed these identified gaps in the true understanding of the customer.

“Most firms today struggle to measure the quality of their customer experience. To establish a framework for measuring customer experience quality, firms should identify key customers, the most important moments of truth in the customer experience continuum, the criteria customers use to evaluate those critical interactions, and metrics — both subjective and objective — that capture how well the organization met customer expectations in each area.”

Effective understanding of the customer does not stop with well designed and built site analytics dashboards and Key Performance Indicator reports; that is just the beginning of visibility into the complete online experience and your customer’s behavior and experiences.

It would be incredulous to believe an online business today could operate without detailed website analytics to gather the bits and bytes to measure the website’s effectiveness, In light of that:

• Why is there a gap in extenuating site analysis into the success of the customer?
• Why are customers continuing to experience issues completing online transactions?
• Why are online conversion rates stagnant across so many industries?

Web Analytics alone can’t provide all necessary measurement and optimization data to improve the customer’s experience.

Eric Peterson, from WebAnalytics Demystifed Inc. discussed these thoughts in a recent paper ‘Customer Experience Management and Web Analytics, From KPIs to Customer Transactions’ covering the foundational needs to combine multiple measurement disciplines for e-businesses today to understand true user behavior and allow companies to improve their customer’ experience.

“In today’s e-business environment, both Web Analytics and Customer Experience Management systems together should be considered foundational to website measurement and optimization. These similar-yet-distinct systems each contribute to a site owner’s ability to recognize, react, and respond to the ongoing challenges they face. Used together, these two technologies are collectively able to resolve the “What, Where, When, and “Why” of visitor interactions on the Internet.

The most forward-thinking companies have already recognized the value of investing in solutions beyond Web Analytics in order to measure and optimize their web channel. By understanding the true strengths and weaknesses of Web Analytics products and how Customer Experience Management systems can best be leveraged, web site owners will be able to extend their web measurement and optimization processes to achieve far greater levels of success – ultimately by improving the site, serving customers better, and increasing site revenue.”

Measure the Customer not the Website

The strongest companies today are taking action to align internal processes and measurement with cross-channel experiences like the website and call-center teams to improve measurement beyond the browser and making their customer experience their top-priority. Not surprisingly this translates to firms that put customer experience on the radar screen at the executive level are best positioned to improve the success of their customer’s experience across the entire enterprise.

While it’s debated today in site forums, user groups and blogs whether “Web Analytics is Hard” or “Web Analytics is Easy”, the recognized need to improving the customer’s experience is universally accepted by analysts, practitioners, experts, pundits and of course by the real end-focus of all these effort, the customers themselves.

Zend Technologies plans to announce availability of the open source Zend Framework 1.5 for building PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) applications next week.

With this release, Zend Framework is to be made available in a version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution in April. Featuring contributions and sponsorships from such vendors as Microsoft, IBM, and Google, Zend Framework 1.5 supports OpenID and Microsoft InfoCard identity management technologies. Also supported is LDAP authentication and the Nirvanix media content storage and delivery network. PHP programmers using the framework can access Nirvanix capabilities.

Other features include new services and enhancements to make it easier to build Web sites faster, including:

* Support for an upload capability for YouTube via new YouTube APIs. Users can upload, watch, and comment on YouTube videos on PHP Web sites.
* Forms, including AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) usage patterns for building Web-based forms
* Layout and View to implement a consistent look and feel throughout applications and keep Web application views componentized
* Lucene search engine to implement advanced queries
* Extended AJAX support on the server to automate AJAX detection and responses to make JavaScript and PHP programming easier
* UTF-8 character sets in Adobe PDF creation, featuring enablement of non-Latin characters like Kanji and Cyrillic when producing PDF documents
* Google GData Web services for building applications that leverage the Google application network. 

Zend is offering a Zend Framework subscription support service, featuring consulting and a guaranteed per-incident response time.

Zend Framework has been downloaded more than 4 million times, according to Zend.

If you’re a web designer, do you consider yourself to be “a creative”? When you describe your profession to others, or when you promote yourself or your agency, are references to creativity prominent in your words? If so, how do you characterize creativity’s role or significance in your work? How closely do your references to creativity conform to the popular understanding of creativity…and how much to its actual nature?

This last distinction is important because the popular conception of creativity and its relationship to design is often distorted. As designers, we are, rightly or not, widely perceived as custodians and professional exponents of creativity. Therefore, the ways in which we define, employ, and represent creativity matter.

In light of this professional responsibility, it’s best that designers recognize the difference between idealistic definitions of creativity and the practical, effective nature of the applied creativity professionals must exercise—and then behave accordingly. Individual designers may have differing ideas about these issues. I believe that our ideas about creativity and how we employ it factor significantly in the quality of our design efforts and in our professional prospects, so I want to challenge your concept of creativity’s place in our work and professional communication.

So what is creativity?

Creativity is…

…never having to say you’re sorry. Yes, just like love. In fact, like love, we must never judge or ridicule creativity. Creativity is precious; it is our birthright and a glowing light that resides within each one of us, making us special and unique…

Well, not really. These sorts of sentiments are fine for young children needing reassurance and encouragement, but as designers, our creative efforts are judged—and rightly so. While many commonly popular definitions of creativity amount to little more than references to self-expression or flamboyancy, we designers should not be so lax or obtuse in our concept of it. Much hinges on our use of creativity, including our clients’ fortunes.

Creativity has nothing at all to do with self-expression or flamboyancy. Aside from the simple ability to create things, the most important feature of creativity is a highly developed perception filter that is somewhat less common than we’re led to believe. Despite what we were taught in school, we don’t all possess significant creativity, and fewer of us still have any skill at employing it. True, anyone can make something, and anyone can make something up. In this mundane sense, everyone is creative. But this basic truth belies the design-relevant definition of creativity, and ignores the fact that each one of us has different creative abilities.

Creativity is technical and analytical, not expressive (as in self-expression). It is a filter through which perception and output pass, not a receptor or an infusion (as in the case of inspiration). Creativity may require or be enhanced by inspiration, but the two are distinct forces. (These facts are vital in discriminating between appropriate and inappropriate descriptions and applications of creativity.)

Creativity is an inborn capacity for thinking differently than most, seeing differently, and making connections and perceiving relationships others miss. But most importantly, it is the ability to then extrapolate contextually useful ways of employing that data: to create something that meets a specific challenge. By this definition, creativity is merely a tool; it does not convey skill. For a dedicated few, though, this inborn capacity is then further augmented by certain disciplines, including:

• ongoing curiosity,
• the desire and habit of looking more deeply into things than others care to,
• the habit of comparing stimulus with result, and
• a habit for qualitative discrimination.

It is primarily these disciplines that set top creative professionals apart from those who are merely gifted. It is also these disciplines that help shape a designer’s intuitive senses, which are vital to design craft, processes, and overall success. Being merely creatively gifted is no qualification for design expertise, and the idea that creativity is a magic bullet that anyone or any designer may employ to positive effect is a vacuous notion.

There is another factor that’s vital to the effective use of creativity in the design process: timing, or when in the design process creativity should be employed. The most effective use of creativity begins with a litany of very un-creative things called “facts”—the facts we get to know during the discovery process.

Careful where you point that thing

The siren song of creativity is likely responsible for more bad design than any other factor. Some might think this overly dramatic, but I believe we should regard creativity as a rather dangerous tool. Like a firearm, it should be treated with caution and respect, and used professionally only by trained individuals.

If you are a designer worth your salt, you know that no design project begins with creativity. Instead, it begins with client- and/or context-specific discovery, and lots of research to help you understand the fundamental nature of the challenges at hand. All designers must guard against the urge to invest in specific creative ideas before becoming intimately familiar with the contextual landscape of a design project.

Sadly, creativity is often used as a crutch, or as a surrogate for design competence. Some individuals reveal themselves as clinging to this practice when they complain that some client work prevents them from “being creative.” What they mean here is that they dislike not being allowed to express themselves. But design competence has little to do with self-expression, and creativity is no substitute for knowledge or comprehensive understanding. Instead, design is most significantly founded on the comprehensive understanding and greatly developed empathetic/sympathetic sense that highly skilled and disciplined individuals bring to bear.

Design creativity often involves coming at a communication or interaction challenge sideways, or from another uncommon angle. In this way, you may find clever or otherwise compelling concepts upon which to base your solution. The thing is, you can never know what constitutes a sideways approach until you have fully explored and are intimately familiar with the entire landscape.

For instance, if your client is NASA and you’re asked to design a spacesuit that allows for a greater degree of physical movement and manual dexterity, you can’t leap straight into creative brainstorming and suggest a form-fitting spandex suit. That would be a creative response to the issue presented to you, but it would also reveal your ignorance of the overall context, e.g. the fact that space is a vacuum.

Creative mythconception

Before we continue, I want to touch on a common misrepresentation of creativity. In discussions with other designers, occasionally one might hear arguments for how web design creativity is or can be stifled by various external forces, like web standards or client-mandated constraints. But these sentiments indicate a flawed concept of creativity, its place in design, and its purpose in our process.

Any reference to constraints that limit creativity is just another way of equating creativity with self-expression, an erroneous and irresponsible idea. Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design. No component fuels creativity more than constraint. Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant. The discovery process is mostly about finding constraints, which is why we must do such a thorough job of it.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles. In a sense, constraints amount to the solution half-built. It is merely up to us to then realize the other half according to what these signposts indicate is appropriate. Nowhere in this concept does self-expression find any valid foothold.

Our intuitive, subjective design senses are relevant to our work. Part of a designer’s job is to show people what they want before they know they want it, and our success in doing so is based largely on our intuitive abilities. But there is a difference between what we prefer and what we know will work best. Competence demands that we understand this difference and filter purely subjective data from sympathetic, fundamentals-based creative work.

Steering the conversation

While my goal here has been to offer designers something to consider about their work and perhaps some challenging ideas to chew on, I have another purpose in all of this. At the start of this article, I asked how you conceive of and associate yourself with ideas of creativity, from a professional perspective. I noted that designers are generally considered to be the custodians of creativity in the professional world, but this distinction may soon come with a cost. So I want to describe a scenario I deem important to our profession, and perhaps to present you with another challenging idea.

If you read any of the prominent business magazines, like Forbes, Fast Company, Business Week, or Inc., you can find in every issue references to how creativity is vital to success. With the tangible benefits of great design being touted and trumpeted from every corner of the business world, companies aim to seize on what they believe to be the key factor in great design and innovation: creativity. What’s so appealing and what is apparently widely believed is that creativity is absolutely free and available to, and from, everyone on staff. Score!

Businesses are also beginning to look beyond their own sandboxes for the benefits of creativity. Many businesses are looking to customers to craft their marketing, believing that the vast pool of ordinary citizens is a valuable untapped creative resource. But when you recognize, as we do, that creativity is not a magic bullet, and that few individuals understand how to employ it effectively, you can sense trouble looming on the horizon.

The ideas circulating in business communities are misguided; the results of this sort of activity are usually wholly unproductive and inevitably lead to disillusionment. But that’s not all they’ll lead to. Another result of this failed effort is likely to be a vengeful backlash against “creativity.” This all-too-predictable pendulum swing will reflect poorly on design professions, which will be both unfortunate and unfair, given that creativity has so little to do with effective design.

Because of this impending trend in much of the business world’s perceptions and opinions of creativity, the design profession will increasingly be judged by how it represents creativity. Web design is one of the so-called creative professions, but that classification has potential to be an albatross around our collective neck, and I think it is a good idea for all of us to soberly consider how we represent value to our clients.

Think about it:

• Are you most comfortable asking your clients to invest in your creativity or in your design competence? Or do you believe these two things to be synonymous?
• If you are the client and you’re spending $450,000 or $45,000 or even $4,500 on design/marketing services, do you trust to design skill or creativity first?
• When a client admonishes you with, “…now I don’t want you to get too creative on this one…” does it indicate that they’ve got a clear grasp of creativity’s place in design work?
• Which quality is easiest to demonstrate to clients and potential clients: your creativity or your skill-based design competence?
• Which quality do you think your clients can more easily grasp and perceive benefit from: your foundational design skills or your creativity?

You’re at the table with fellow designers, an art director, and a creative director. The large screen displays designs you’re about to collectively critique. This is the first time you’ll all consider the initial round of concepts. The designs go up, one by one, and the words begin to flow.

It’s a phrase you hear often: design is in the details. With design, paying attention to small details—and in some cases, obsessively focusing on “what isn’t right”—can take a design from “nearly there” to “there” and beyond.

I attend meetings in which designers present their designs—typically the first round of comps—for the first time. Half the time, the presenting designer shows a rough product on the screen, and they usually believe the design is 90-100% done. But to the detail-savvy designer, the work is only 50-70% there. You can see the groundwork, foundation, and feel of the design in front of you, but you know it’s just not finished.

The goal of embracing details is to get you to think critically and present the best possible design you can—right from round one. In essence, you want your design to be ready for a real client presentation. So how do you take a design to 100%? You need to achieve polish, ridding the client’s mind of any doubt that the design is unfinished. It’s all too common for designers to feel rushed: you’re under deadline, you’re under pressure. But if you care about your craft and your ideas, you’ll take the extra time, perhaps working late into the night, as we all have, and add the touches that you know will make your work really shine. You know that feeling you get when you think, “Oh, I knew I should have tried that”? Do it the first time it comes to mind. Don’t let someone in your design review bring up an idea you thought of first.

Tips and techniques fortify any designer’s toolkit, but I must stress that thinking critically about a design is as important as the tools and skills needed to produce it.

Here’s a checklist to guide and inspire you to get the site done, done, done. Leave no stone unturned and no doubts about the design you present—let it shine.

Experiment

It’s not unusual for me to create up to four concurrent comps for just the first round of internal design presentations. I use these to “sketch” out designs. A navigation or logo treatment that doesn’t work in one comp may work in another comp. This allows you to have what I call “The Beautiful Mistake”—placing elements in other environments that create possibilities. Instead of feeling like you have designer’s block, just throw the ideas you have into comps and see where they lead. Getting started is half the battle.

On the same note, don’t be afraid to start over. If something isn’t working, close it up and trash it. If you think the navigation is too precious, remember how you did it, then start from that point in the next design. The goal is to refine, over and over.

Choices

There are many choices to be made when you’re designing—everything from type, to colors, to overall tone of the site. Sometimes, I like to throw a lot of things at a design to see what sticks, and sometimes I start minimally. Strive to make smart, simple choices. If there’s an easier way to design something, do it. The complicated choice will feel complicated to the client and intended audience unless you can make a complex interaction looks simple.

Stay consistent

Once you make choices, stick with them. If you choose to pad items with 10 pixels in sidebars but use 15 pixels in larger text areas, make sure the comps reflect those decisions. Keep notes while designing—these will form a good basis for a style guide. Consistency displays sophistication and shows that you fully understood and made sound decisions. Consistency should be transparent.

Completeness

Finish the design. Don’t miss a footer or a detail. Don’t say, “That’s to be filled in later—I didn’t have time.” Make the time. Don’t give any reason for others to torpedo the design or allow someone to fixate on a little detail—overshadowing the rest of the work. It’s these little details that deserve your attention. Creative directors, art directors, and especially clients will perseverate on details like this, so make sure the details are there.

Step in, step out, step back: balance

During a design, it’s best to step away from the design occasionally—even just for lunch or a 15-minute break. Look at something else. Come back and look at your design again. Think about your first impressions. Your own gut reaction will likely be similar to the initial impressions of those who see it for the first time. Take note and revise or change your design based on those impressions. Regardless of how “cool” or “neat” a particular element may be, if it doesn’t serve your design in a useful way, get rid of it and try something new. Always step back and re-evaluate.

Be your own critic

If you’re familiar with the team you regularly work with, the client or the client’s needs, look at your design as you get close to done and think about parts that will potentially provoke questions or concerns. Have a solid answer for the decisions you made.

Complexity in simplicity: less is more

When we discuss “less is more”, we mean different things. For example, sometimes the design needs to scale back. It’s got too many elements. Or a design chokes itself with too many colors. When doing detail work, “less is more” is about leaving in only everything that is necessary and making it harmonious. Let the complexity be in the simplicity—a design is not useful when it’s perceived to be complex. A design should be useful, simple, and straightforward—let the complexity shine through via simplicity.

Obsession is healthy

If I don’t feel right about a navigation or a flash widget that displays photos, I will sit and stew and sketch until I find something that fits. Design is a puzzle you create for yourself—you have all the pieces, but it’s up to you to decide how they fit. Perfection is not something to strive for, but close to perfect is—it leaves room for exploration, dialogue, and learning.

I find myself thinking about designs I’m working on at odd periods of the day—in the shower, making dinner, or walking to the corner store. Small, quiet moments are when I have breakthroughs and solve problems. These are the times when the right details will appear. This isn’t often billable time, but it’s a good exercise to think about a design before attempting it. I don’t sketch much using pencil and paper; I like to let a design percolate and grow in my mind before committing it to the screen. I imagine the look, the feel, and the details. I relish the details.

In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about “task flows” or “flow charts” but there’s another type of flow that we should keep in mind. It’s that feeling of complete absorption when you’re engaged in something you love to do without being disrupted by anxiety or boredom caused by tasks that are confusing, repetitive or overly taxing.

Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. Software engineers might feel it when they’re writing code, gamers might feel it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.

How do we create sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it starts with a site that solves a challenging problem and is complex enough to require a certain amount of learning by the user. The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.

The way to make the complex feel painless is to design with flow in mind. By designing a site that is fluid and intuitive and inspires flow, you help new users get up-to-speed more quickly, reduce the chance that existing users leave your site to switch to another and create users that evangelize your site to other people. That results in more users, increased activity, and greater awareness of your site.

The following four rules are based on Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (more info) and are meant to help nurture the flow experience in users.

1. Set clear goals

The first step in designing for flow is to set clear goals for your users. It’s important to create both an overarching goal as well as smaller, incremental goals. Goals help users understand where they’re going and each step they’ll take to get there.

Marketing copy is often low on the list of priorities, but it can be key to helping users form their goals. When describing their products on their company homepage, 37signals avoids the typical marketing jargon in favor of down-to-earth language. Campfire’s description: “It’s like instant messaging, but optimized for groups. Especially great for remote teams.” These descriptions help visitors understand product differentiations and how each might be used in real-world situations.

On personal organization tool Backpack, 37signals provides a fantastic set of examples to help users understand the specific uses for the application. They show how one might use Backpack to plan a wedding, comparison shop or organize employee searches. For users who have a difficult time figuring out what they’re supposed to do with a site and who find a list of features meaningless, these examples can be invaluable in setting goals. Realistic examples help users understand how they might use the site and inspire them to achieve what they’ve visualized.

2. Provide immediate feedback

Once users understand what they can achieve via the site, they’ll want to start making progress towards realizing their goals. It’s the job of the site to provide the necessary guidance so that the user feels they are actively achieving them.

Wufoo, an application that helps people build forms and collect information, does an excellent job of guiding users through form creation. Their wizard-style interface provides instantaneous feedback by showing a live preview of the user’s form as they create it. By doing so, they’ve removed the potential anxiety of not knowing what the end product will look like. Users can see that the tasks they are performing are continuously moving them toward their goals.

Flickr’s Flash-based image upload tool is another good example of providing users with immediate feedback. File upload on the web has always been a less-than-ideal user experience. Typically, a user selects a file using a file upload form control, submits the form and waits, sometimes for quite a long time, for some sort of confirmation screen. Flickr has improved upon that process by allowing users to see the progress of each image. Users no longer need to fear a long wait just to see an error screen. They can watch the progress bar and know that photos are being uploaded.

3. Maximize efficiency

Once a user becomes comfortable with a site, they’ll want to start using it more efficiently. When they’re experiencing flow, users want to work more quickly and want the site to feel more responsive.

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.

Backpack provides a great example of efficiency with its options for reminders. Rather than selecting a day, a month, a year, an hour, and a minute, they’ve provided some extremely useful shortcuts to let you select options like “later today” or “in two weeks”. They’ve avoided forcing an unnecessarily complex interface on their users because they’ve thought beyond how the data goes into the database. They’ve removing the friction that would be created by forcing users to think about specific days and times, allowing them to choose an option that feels more natural.

4. Allow for discovery

Once a user has begun to work with maximum efficiency, there’s a chance that they’ll feel less engaged and grow bored with their experience on the site. In order to avoid this, you should make content and features available for discovery.

For content sites, this may be as simple as displaying newly created content in the hopes that it will catch the user’s eye. The website of The New York Times includes a “Most Popular” module that displays the most emailed, most blogged and most searched stories. Even though these aren’t based on information of individual readers, these are extremely relevant to most users since they pinpoint the stories that grab the attention of the average person.

Ebay makes features discoverable by placing them in the context in which users will be most likely to try them out. For example, when looking at an item on Ebay, underneath the link to “Watch this item” are links to mobile or IM alerts. The people at Ebay know that alerts lead to more active participation, so they promote them where users will be most interested in them. This kind of discovery allows users to continuously learn new things and find new ways to interact with a site.

Go with the flow

Flow is a powerful psychological experience. Designing for flow requires an enlargement of empathy and a deepening of emotional and intellectual subtlety. It is the difference between creating chapter markers and telling a story.

A site designed for flow must appeal to new users and power users alike. It must stretch both sets of users in a way they find enjoyable rather than daunting. Despite the challenges, the rewards of designing for flow are a user base that is loyal and enthusiastic—one that will evangelize your site to others—and a more profound sense of engagement between you and the people for whom you design.