User flow

A user flow follows one person with one goal. It starts where they arrive, which may be an email link, a notification or a button on the dashboard, and ends where the task is done, abandoned or failed. Between the two it records what the person does, what the product shows back, and every point where the path splits: a check that can fail, a permission they may not have, a record that already exists.

Teams draw flows as boxes and arrows on a whiteboard, as a flowchart, or as a wireflow, which puts a rough screen layout in each box. The flow usually comes before detailed screens, so the team agrees which states need designing before anyone designs them.

A screen can be well designed and still leave someone stuck. The step before it accepted their store key without checking it, or nobody designed what a user without admin rights sees. Drawing the flow lists those states while they are still cheap to change, so they are in the scope and the estimate when engineering starts. It also gives product, design and engineering one picture of the task to work from.

Each flow begins as one task written as an outcome: who does it, where they start and what counts as finished. We trace that task through the live product, following the main path and then the interruptions: missing data, a validation error, an expired session, a return visit. Then we map its decisions, permissions and recovery paths, and prototype the steps we are least sure of.

We review the flow with your engineers for feasibility, resolve each state, and check them in the build, including loading, empty and error states. A product sprint puts a working prototype of one flow in front of your users in a week. Designing flows in full is product design, from $10,000 a month, and a focused piece takes four to six weeks.

Say an operations product shows “Connected” as soon as a retailer pastes a store key. Drawn as a flow, that one word covers three steps: the key is accepted, the permissions are checked, the orders are imported. The drawing shows that the permissions check can fail and that the import can stall halfway. The redesign gives each step its own status, and a failed check lists the missing permissions with a link to where the retailer grants them.