Creating User Flows
When designing a user experience, it’s important to think through how your user will interact with your website, app, document, etc. To help think through and outline all the possible paths a person may take, we develop user flows.
What are user flows in user experience design? Simply put, the concept of flow was first coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He deemed it a highly focused mental state where the user is fully immersed in what they are doing and the task they aim to accomplish. It is often referred to as being “in the zone.” User flows in UX design help designers understand and anticipate the cognitive patterns of our users in order to create products that enable this state of flow.
User flows, UX flows, or flowcharts, as they are sometimes called, are diagrams that display the complete path a user takes when using a product. The user flow lays out the user’s movement through the product, mapping out each and every step the user takes—from entry point right through to the final interaction.
Here is an example of a user flow:
