Find your flow: Increasing flow experience by designing “human” embedded systems

In this paper, we argue that future systems need to be designed using a flexible user-centric design methodology geared primarily toward maximizing the user satisfaction (i.e., flow experience) rather than seeking mainly optimization of performance and power consumption. Compared to the traditional design, we aim at re-focusing the current design paradigm by placing the user behavior at the center of the design process and by using psychological variables such as user ability and motivation as the main drivers of this process. This allows systems to become more capable of promptly adapting to different users´ needs and of enhancing short- and long-term user satisfaction. Preliminary results show the potential of this methodology for maximizing the users´ positive experience when running embedded applications on multiprocessor platforms.