The How (and Why) of User Flows - Learn UXD

This resource first appeared in issue #45 on 09 Oct 2020 and has tags Strategy: Product/Service Management

The How (and Why) of User Flows - Learn UXD

This is a good short introduction to how to plan or document user flows. The context of the article is doing it for web or mobile applications, but really it can be applied to any process a user has to go through (often then called “service design”).

I’m putting this in “Research Computing Systems” because I think in research software development or data management, the research computing teams are generally pretty decent at imagining themselves as the users - writers of simulation or data analysis software for research are often using the software themselves or working very closely with the people who are.

On the other hand the operators of research computing systems are more often - not universally, but more often - quite detached from the day-to-day users of the systems. As a result, for instance I’ve seen user registration processes which are complicated messes which make perfect sense when viewed from the inside as each step ticks some box but from from the outside is convoluted and opaque. Stepping through the user flows helps visualize things from the user’s point of view and points out steps that can be simplified or consolidated.