Uncovering associations between users' behaviour and their flow experience

Abstract

Flow experience is one of the most ambitious targets of any user interface designer. However, it has remained elusive to evaluate how well user interfaces give rise to flow experience outside conducting invasive self-reporting-based questionnaires, which remove the users from the flow experience and can't be massively applied. At the same time, otherwise, well-built systems do track the behaviour of users on the interface, and therefore, user behaviour data could act as a reliable proxy for assessing the experience of users. Currently, there is little empirical research or data about which indices of user behaviours might correspond with having a flow experience as well as the different psychological constituents of the flow experience. Therefore, facing the challenge of using users' behaviour data to model users' experience, we investigated the associations between users' behaviour data (e.g. mouse clicks, activity time in the system, and average response time) and their self-reported flow experience by using data mining (i.e. associations rules) analysing data from 204 subjects. Results demonstrate that the speed of users' actions negatively affects the flow experience antecedents while also positively affecting the loss of self-consciousness. Our study advances the literature, providing insights to identify users' flow experience through behaviour data.