From my preceding post on our wonderful experience in Mount Cook building the new Travel Generation website I have done some more reading about the concept of “flow” in website design. According to Chicago University Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”), a great website is created not by navigating through content but by staging a complete experience for the users. Csikszentmihalyi explains this experience as a finely tuned sense of rhythm, involvement, and anticipation known as “flow.”

Flow is an “intense emotional involvement” and timelessness that comes from complete sensory engagement of immersion in any particular activity, created by the here and now. Marketing specialists like Vanderbilt University’s Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, propose that in website design flow is “a central construct when considering consumer navigation on commercial websites.

So what does this mean for a user? A website that achieves flow would draw a user in for the sake of the website activity alone. The users time would fly; they would move effortlessly from action to action without disrupting their thought pattern. Creating a website like this entails creating a story or path that the user will follow. Most websites on the other hand give the users the choice to pick and choose their own paths. The problem here is that they may never find their flow and therefore leave the site prematurely. Most sites assume the user knows what to choose.

The Oz Experience website we launched last month has flow. Early on in our analysis we realised that the customers did not know what bus passes to choose, they did not know exactly where they wanted to go in Australia. Instead we broke up the passes, mapped them onto Google maps and created a path that the user can travel along, following the route of the products, selecting destinations, hostels, and activities along the way to create their own product – but never falling out of flow. We are enticing the user into the website and leading them somewhere (to making a travel plan and purchasing a pass) through the labyrinth of choices.

Oz Experience works – we are getting over 10 new travel passes created a day – some of them very detailed. The average time on the site is up around 10 minutes; and of course sales are going up as less users are abandoning the site without a least the commitment of making a travel plan. Notably, many users are returning and purchasing their bus passes after making their plans. Oz Experience is definitely a website with flow!

From a business perspective, and the success of the Oz Experience website, the creation of flow is only as good as the milestones along the way that transform the random path into a traverse of the website into a goal. We have built a hierarchy of milestones, with little goals (such as creating and saving you travel plan, scheduling your data and so on) that build toward the most meaningful milestone of making a purchase of a buss pass through the website.

Finally we actually reward the user for getting themselves into the flow and in fact add stickiness to the whole story. As the user builds up their basket of destinations, hostels and activities we “recommend” the bus passes that best fits their consumption bundle – we are rewarding them for making choices and similarily continuing to guide them further along the traverse to purchase. The Oz Experience website is not naturally easy to immediately navigate, in fact, it slightly challenges the user – but that is part of the seductiveness – it draws the customer in and then once within it’s walls it overloads their sensors moving them easily from action to action. In this case the flow is the glue that is turning lookers to bookers for Oz Experience!

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