What The Flow!? : Part 1
Yup. WTF!? was my first thought many moons, when I was asked to take my first user flow and create a low fidelity design from it and present it to the product stakeholders.
In this 2 part series I explore, What are user flows and why you need to use them?
I do care deeply about technology and the way we communicate how it works, always thinking about what tools and methods we use to get our ideas across among other designers and developers.
Thinking about how we communicate with people outside of our professions, away from the comfort of our jargon and familiar tools. This is why I care about user flows and why they are so important.
In this first part of this article series, we’ll go through the big WTF in design: “What the flow!”. Answering what user flows are, the fundamentals of user flows, and then we’ll finish with a few examples, and in the next few days, part 2.
Contents: WTF are user flows? & WTF am I looking at?
WTF are user flows?
What are user flows in a nice neat sentence?
A user flow is a series of steps a user takes to achieve a meaningful goal.
And why are they used?
They are used to communicate the intended flow of a user through various pages and actions in an app or website.
Great, and what are they made of?
A User Flow usually includes a name, steps, users, and a description of what happens at each step.
Quote from,
Alex Handley, Primary Co-founder
Nice and simple. (source here)
User flows are another method to segment and define your digital product, customer experience, website, or app.
So it’s just another method, except, the beautiful thing about user flows is their ability to define sections of something gnarly, abstract and technical like “cross-platform mobile experiences” from the perspective of the user.
Not the underlying technology’s flow.
Not the development methodology’s flow.
Not the person implementing the design’s flow.
It’s the user’s flow. As in, the people that you’re designing for.
If you remember one thing about user flows, it’s to define them by the goal your user achieves by completing the flow.
For example, a User Flow could detail how website visitors create an account, order a flamethrower or subscribe to a mailing list.
Here’s a stock-standard example of a user flow:
And now lets take a look at something a bit more interesting:
WTF am I looking at?
I’m lucky enough to help and receive help from over a dozen startups this year alone. In every conversation, I think “WTF”, you know “what’s the flows”.
Here’s the reconstruction of a few typical conversations and why they highlight the need for user flows.
Startup founder
Product designer. I forgot to include the 2.1gb Sketch file.
Technology is wonderfully free. Free like a team independently creating the different parts of a rubric’s cube where the colors and number of sides are decided in progressive sprints.
(image credit: Freepik)
This freedom works for software but it has it’s side-effects. I think that user flows are best antidote we have for the “wtf am I looking at” issue we have in communicating anything tech. They help our audience orient themselves on jargon-free and sensical questions:
What is the goal of this thing (app/website/product/digital kiosk future customer experience)?
Who is doing it?
and How do they do it?
And that wraps up my first segment on WTF!? (What the flow). I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and maybe walked away having learned something.
Join me next time, as I go through a simple system to create these (overly?) hyped user flows.
