Have you ever experienced a time when you were so immersed in what you were doing that you forgot about your physical feelings and the passage of time? This highly-rewarding mental state is known as flow, and it is studied and characterized by a renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I had the great pleasure of hearing Prof. Csikszentmihalyi himself speak on this topic at the Persuasive2009 conference. The talk was enlightening and made me understand why I sometimes forgot to eat or sleep when deeply absorbed in solving a problem.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is an optimal state that can be attained when the challenges we encounter are matched to our ability. When the task is slightly too easy (or too hard) we fall out of flow and go into a state where we feel in control (or aroused if the task is slightly too hard). When the task difficulty greatly exceeds our skills, we are likely to experience anxiety. And if the task challenges do not come close to our ability, we will often experience boredom (see figure).

As illustrated by the figure, this also implies that when we are in a state of control or relaxation, we simply have to challenge ourselves and pick a more difficult task to get back into flow. However, if we picked a task that is too hard, we must learn and increase our skills gradually in order to move back into flow. Therefore, we learn the most when we are in the arousal state.

Picking a task that is just challenging enough for us to move into the flow state is not easy because the tasks we encounter do not have a continuous range of difficulty. Moreover, the exact level of challenge for a task is difficult to gauge. In an attempt to challenge ourselves, we often pick a task that is too hard and go into a state of anxiety. This is why many people like to stay in the comfort zone of control and relaxation and do not like to challenge themselves. Consequently, flow is not a common mental state.

Although flow is not common, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi has mentioned that they are more prevalent in creative professionals, such as artists, composers, poets, scientists, mathematicians, etc... This is because these professions require much self-challenge to create something novel and original. Due to the distinctive gaming heritage of Lithium, we know another group of people who often experience flow. Can you guess? Yes, they are the gamers. If you know friends who are into gaming, or if you have teenage children who are addicted to computer games, you will know what I am talking about. They will play tirelessly for hours, if not days, straight.

So what is it about video games that enable people to move into flow so easily? Actually, games in general (not limited to video games) can create an artificial environment where the task difficulty is well-controlled and increase gradually. This makes it much easier for gamers to pick a just-challenging-enough game to move them into flow (B2 in figure). Even if a gamer accidentally chose something too difficult, it would most likely not be something totally beyond his skill. So, they would experience arousal (B3) rather than anxiety or worry (B4), which is undesirable. In the arousal state, gamers only have to learn a little bit to increase their skills sufficiently to move back into flow (C). This will in turn encourage gamers to take on more challenges. This feedback dynamic is what makes so many gamers addicted to playing their favorite games.

As a practitioner of this theory, Lithium knew all along that the reason a superuser would spend 8 hours online answering questions is precisely the same reason that a gamer would play for days without sleeping. In fact, the Lithium platform is built upon our deep understanding of various gaming and social dynamics. The control--arousal--flow dynamic is just one of many that are deeply ingrained in our rich and flexible reputation engine. This is the reason we are able to attract and keep those superusers who will spend many hours on our communities. Moreover, because flow is inherently a rewarding and desirable mental state, superusers are often happy to volunteer their time and effort. To them, it's just like playing a game.

Despite my personal rediscovery of the connection between flow, gamers, and superuers, I must clarify that I am not claiming that a superuser answering questions online is necessarily experiencing flow. Whether superusers truly experience flow is a research question that can only be addressed via the scientific method. I was just inspired by Csikszentmihalyi and wanted to share the spark in my mind.

Having discussed the relationship between flow, gamers, and superusers, next time we will apply the theory of flow to help us design the optimal ranking structure that engages the superusers. Stay tuned at mich8elwu.

Couple weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel at the Persuasive2009 conference. The panel was on new metrics for engagement and I was to speak about the community health index (CHI). However, the audience was primarily social psychologists from both academia and industry. And all of them have a common interest in Persuasive technologies, which is defined by its inventor, Prof. B.J. Fogg, in his book to be any technology "that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion." So, I was challenged with the task of relating CHI to engagement and persuasion. As a scientist, I did my homework. I read up on the most authoritative research papers in this field and came up with the following strategy.

First, I evaluated the Lithium platform by a persuasive system evaluation framework. This framework was published by Prof. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen in last year's conference proceedings and has already been adopted by researchers in this field. So I thought this would be a good place to start. In addition to some basic requirements, the paper outlined 28 persuasive design features that are grouped into 4 categories. To my surprise, the Lithium platform actually met all the basic requirements. Moreover our platform currently has 25 out of the 28 persuasive features. This allowed me to confidently conclude that our community platform is in fact a very persuasive system!

The next step was to relate all this to CHI. Since the panel was on metrics for engagement, I have reinterpreted the 6 health factors of CHI as measures of engagement: 

1. Traffic: is a measure of passive engagement.

2. Content: is a measure of passive engagement.

3. Members: is the conversion rate from passive to active engagement.

4. Liveliness: quantifies the likelihood of any user to engage actively.

5. Interaction: is an estimate of the scope of the engagement.

6. Responsiveness: measures the quality of the engagement.

By reinterpreting the health factors as measures of engagement, CHI can take on a whole new meaning. Since every engagement provides an opportunity for persuasion, CHI is actually a measure of "persuasibility". Although the Lithium community platform was not designed nor thought of as a persuasive system, it can certainly be used as one. In addition, we can now measure the persuasibility of this system.

My research really paid off at the end, because it has made the Lithium platform and CHI very digestible to the audiences. I was pretty thrilled to find my framework for CHI was tweeted and blogged, by Maury Giles from Pursuit, another panelist at the conference.

Next time, I will tell you a bit more about some of the fascinating things I've learned at the conference. For updates, come and follow me at mich8elwu.

Photo by David Lin

Hello everyone. I'm Michael, the principal scientist working on analytics at Lithium. With most scientific endeavors, the principal investigator is only one member of the team, and analytics at Lithium is no exception. By the way, Lithium has the witty culture of naming our development teams after superheroes. So can you guess what the analytics team is called? Hint... there is a recent movie about this group. You guessed it: the X-Men!

We chose this name because the variable X is commonly used to represent an unknown quantity. Also, X has a visual resemblance to the Greek letter chi (χ), which is what I used as the symbol for the Community Health Index (CHI).

After being a guest blogger on ScottD's blog for the past few months, we decided that I should have a blog of my own. For the sake of bookkeeping, I've gathered here previous blog articles that I've written on the development of CHI.

1.       From the Brain to Community Analytics

2.       Criteria for Creating the Community Health Index

3.       Crunching Numbers for the Community Health Index

4.       Interpreting the Statistics for CHI

5.       Formulate, Predict, and Reformulate

I will use this blog to share my passion and love for science and analytics. I will explain, and try hard to explicate in laymen terms whenever possible, some of the fascinating research that is conducted here at Lithium. This blog will also be home to tidbits of interesting scientific findings that never made it out the door as products or white papers. Finally, I will share some of my personal experiences as a scientist in the industry. This will cover everything from the people I meet while attending conferences, to interesting conversations I have with fellow practitioners, to topics I’m thinking about.

I will end this first blog post with a quote by Sir. Humphry Davy, recorded when he was defending the so-called "useless experiments" conducted by his student, Michael Faraday. This quote was also recited by Brian Cox at the end of his short TED Talk this week.

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate. That there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."

Likewise, nothing in this blog is absolute. If you disagree with me, let's discuss and talk about it. That is how science makes progress.