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A UX designer’s guide to user flows

What are user flows and how should I be using them in my digital product?

Daniel Birch
UX Collective
6 min readJul 13, 2020

User flows on whiteboard

When you need to understand how a user will go through your product or feature you should always start with high-level user flows. User flows help determine how many screens are needed, what order they should appear in, and what components need to be present.

Understand your users

Before you get to this stage you should have some solid user research done and understand the pain points you are solving or the solution you are providing. This will help you define a user story or an epic to base this flow on.

Some of the other techniques used for user research include empathy mapping, user interviews, and needs statements.

You can make the user flows to align with user stories or you can create them for new features or even entire products. Usually applying a set of user stories will mean you are catering for all scenarios. You might have one primary user story that then has several smaller ones that lie underneath it.

What’s the difference between user flows and user journeys?

User flows are normally boxes and arrows, they follow the steps or stages a user…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Daniel Birch

Entrepreneur, UX agency CEO & 14 years + in design Industry. Specialist in UX, CX, UI and digital design. userxd.co https://www.linkedin.com/in/birchdaniel/

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

Very nice read, Daniel. I personally am close to obsessed with user flow diagrams and have made them an essential stage of virtually every project I start working on these days. It’s also great that we got specialized tools out there nowadays that…

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Really great article from a lay-person‘s perspective. I’ve done poor man versions of flows for years but this succinct approach will really help me moving forward. Thank you.

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thankyou for the insight!

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