The range of our emotions and feelings is very broad, which begs the question, when do we perform at our best? We know that boredom can be crucial in problem-solving, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your performance and engagement with an activity is going to be Optimal when you're bored; it's likely to be the reverse. But similarly, we're not at our best when we're over-stimulated.Happily, this is a question that has received a lot of research attention. In the clip below, HCI Professor Alan Dix takes us through three topics relevant to design for optimized performance:Yerkes-Dodson's curveCsikszentmihalyi's theory of flowZone of proximal developmentThe first two are most relevant to...