A UX designer’s guide to user flows

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

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 takes through a given feature set or objective.

User journeys are based on one user’s journey through your product, they are usually more high level and contain an end to end experience. User flows are used primarily for new features and ideas and go into task breakdown.

User journeys are best created by your entire product team via a workshop and contain information on key stages, user goals, screens, pain points, insights, and ideas. This article will focus on user flows, you can see an example user journey below.

High-level user flows

We use high-level user flows when we are first starting to plan an idea. It gives an easy overview of each stage of the user’s process without digging too much into the…