When your flowchart becomes the playing field – introducing XF-Man
Flying in Excel, pinball in Word, a dinosaur in your browser. Playful surprises in serious software have a history spanning decades. Joining this tradition is xFLOWer's minigame, XF-Man — with a level built from your own business process.
A purchase request's journey from initial approval to order placement. An invoice review, with missing information supplied if needed. An investigation into a customer complaint involving several specialist teams.
Behind flowcharts lie real tasks, responsibilities and decisions. Designing them requires focus and business expertise. Along the way, however, something visually compelling emerges: a network of paths, branches, intersections and destinations.
This was the starting point for XF-Man. What if we could explore that same network in a completely different way for a quick game?
On xflower.ai, you can now try a minigame that turns your flowchart into a playing field. The green START element sets off, process steps become checkpoints to visit, and pursuers along the routes make progress more challenging.
From a secret room to a flying spreadsheet
Hidden surprises built into software are called Easter eggs, named after the eggs hidden at Easter. They can be concealed messages, special animations or even complete minigames. Sometimes an unusual keyboard shortcut reveals them; other times, it takes noticing a tiny detail.
One of the best-known early stories involves Atari's Adventure game. Its creator, Warren Robinett, placed his name in a secret room because Atari did not credit programmers as the creators of its games at the time. Robinett explained in an interview how this hidden signature could be found. Here, the surprise was a personal signature: it revealed the person behind the software.
In the 1990s, workplace applications also concealed some truly surprising worlds:
Excel 95 hid a three-dimensional space known as the “Hall of Tortured Souls,” featuring developers' names.
In Excel 97, users could access a hidden 3D environment reminiscent of a flight simulator.
In Word 97, a special sequence of actions revealed a pinball game.
Similar stories are featured in ExamSnap's roundup of Microsoft Easter eggs. It is worth noting that these surprises belong to specific, older software versions: there is little point in following the same steps to find them in today's Word or Excel.
The contrast made them memorable. A user would be preparing a budget or editing a document, then suddenly discover an entirely different world behind the familiar interface.
Playfulness lives on in browsers and task management tools
Chrome's dinosaur is tied to an everyday frustration. The internet connection drops, the T-Rex appears, and moments later we are jumping over cacti. Google's conversation with the creators reveals that easing the frustration of being offline was precisely what inspired the idea.
Asana chose a different moment: completing a task. Celebratory characters occasionally glide across the screen, offering a small visual reward for work done. Asana's own introduction highlights how the unicorn and its companions celebrate the joy of completing a task. This is more playful feedback than a classic hidden minigame, but it exemplifies the same human-centered approach to product design.
Microsoft Edge's surfing game shows how an Easter egg can become a permanent part of a product. According to Microsoft's account, after the initial surprise, users asked for the game to remain available. This led to Surf, a built-in browser game that can be launched at edge://surf in the browser.
These examples give playfulness different roles: a creator's signature, an unexpected discovery, a brief break or a celebration of a completed task.
Of these, XF-Man is most closely tied to discovery. After all, the source of the surprise is the user's own work.
What makes all this work in an enterprise application?
In enterprise software, predictable behavior comes first. Users want to know what they have started, what has changed, and how they can continue working.
Playful features must fit into this framework too. They belong in the interface only if users can choose to discover them, understand them, and use them without affecting business operations.
For XF-Man, one important design decision ensures this: the game is a separate view of the process. It does not modify the model, trigger business operations, or affect how the process works. After playing, you can resume editing exactly where you left off.
The game connects to the product through the level itself. Users recognize their own creation in it: the approval path they just drew, the branch they added, and the more distant points in the process.
What you just designed, you can now play through.
Your own process, from a different perspective
The game's main character is the green START element, which you move along the flowchart's connecting lines. The goal is to visit every process step while avoiding the opponents moving along the paths.
The pursuers are playful bogeymen from the world of process design. They evoke a familiar situation: you are just about to reach the next stop when something crosses your path. Here, however, they are part of a short arcade challenge, and you can try again in the next round.
The completed diagram thus takes on a dual role. During editing, it shows how you want to organize the work. During play, the network of paths and nodes takes center stage.
There is an important distinction between the two: completing the level does not validate the process. Moving a character through the diagram does not tell you whether the business rules are correct, the permissions are appropriate, or every exceptional situation has been addressed. Moreover, a real process often follows only one of the possible branches; it is not meant to visit every step.
XF-Man adds a sense of discovery and relaxation to the design interface. Professional review and testing still have their own essential role.
An easy-to-use tool, carefully considered business operations
For more than twenty years, xFLOWer has been built on the principle that professionals who understand business processes should be able to create working workflows and business applications without programming knowledge.
This requires user-friendly visual tools. Procurement managers need to focus on approval procedures, customer service professionals on escalation rules, and HR teams on onboarding tasks.
With xFLOWer.ai this approach goes further: it helps create a complete, executable workflow from a text description, including the associated forms and business rules. Naturally, this too must be reviewed and tested before going live.
Alongside an easy-to-use interface, business thinking therefore remains essential. Who makes the decision? Based on what data? What happens when information is incomplete? Who takes over the task if the original owner is unavailable?
These are serious questions. Yet the tool we use to answer them can still be approachable, enjoyable, and occasionally playful.
Try it with your own process!
Visit xflower.ai and describe the business process you want to implement. You could start with approving a purchase request or onboarding a new employee.
Review the generated process, adapt it to your operations, then simply type this into the prompt field:
“I want to play”
XF-Man starts — and you have already created the level.
