User flow tutorial | How I use them in design projects

hi I'm Christine and today we're going to talk about user flows I use them all the time when working on projects and so I wanted to share with you how I create them and use them and my job there are three main questions that I'm going to answer in this video the first one is what is a user flow so we're going to go over the basic definition of a user flow the second question is why do designers use user flows and why are they valuable the third one that I'm going to cover is what do user flows look like and how do I create one and then at the very end we're going to do a practice exercise together so that you have a better understanding of how user flows are actually used in the context of a project with business and tech constraints in mind so let's first define what a user flow is a user flow is a series of actions a user takes to achieve a goal and there are three key components to a user flow that you first need to define the first question is who is the user the second question is what is their goal what are they trying to achieve or accomplish the third question is what are the actual steps that they need to take in order to achieve that goal so once you have these three things solidified it's so much easier to do the rest of the wire flows and the tax flows that we'll be covering now that we know what a user flow is let's talk about their importance why do designers use user flows why are they relevant user flow is just another method to communicate your designs to engineers product managers or other stakeholders from the perspective of the user the people you're designing for when you're the weaves of designing it's easy to get lost in the technical jargon the project requirements people's opinions and by the end of the project the user is not even in the conversation anymore to give you a real-life example I recently worked on an instant payment feature at instacart where shoppers can is cash out their earnings into their bank accounts after working a few hours on the instacart platform my team consisted of a product manager mobile engineers back-end engineers and other leads from cross-functional teams and during this project kickoff I was given a dog that listed out all the project requirements and it looked something like this and I was just told to come up with designs like WTF what's the flow there's a great medium article written by Alex Haley that I'll put a link down below he covers his topic of what's the flow and he lays out the foundation of user flows that's very easy to understand so I recommend that you check out his articles if you have time so once you're given these project requirements as a designer you need to make sure that your team doesn't get lost and the technicality of things but instead guide them to focus on what the user is trying to achieve with the feature and this is where user flows can come in really handy as a tool user flows were a crucial part of my workflow in this project because this project was very big and super hairy there were a lot of use cases to consider then especially when I was taking off and handing off designs to engineering user flows were very helpful because it helped devs understand better how to build the logic of these different screens by seeing how a user will interact with them in different scenarios at this point you might be wondering when does a designer typically create user flows there is no right or wrong time really it's when you think is appropriate but I normally create user flows during the beginning of the projects when I'm laying down the foundation of what I'm designing and also to see how a feature translates into a real-life situation with the user as the main character so the bigger the project is the more time I spend on creating user flow so that I have all the use cases in mind as I'm designing and sketching out the basic wireframes of the high fidelity mock-ups that are going to be fleshed out in the coming weeks now what does a user flow visually look like a user flow can be a combination of task flows and why your flows which can be in both low fidelity or high fidelity mock-ups but before we go through them one by one in detail let's first define the user and what their goal is if we were to take the instant payment feature as an example who of the either be the user would be the shopper who is working for instacart and what would the shoppers goal be the goal would be to cash out their earnings immediately after working a few hours on the insta card platform these user goals can sometimes be called user stories my team doesn't really call them anything so I think these terms can be held very loosely now that we've defined the user and their goal let's move on to the task flow task flow is the series of steps that the user has to take to achieve the goal of cashing out instantly first I start with a paper and pen and start writing down high-level steps of a user trying to use the instant payment feature I ask myself where the user would be able to access this feature where would they start in the instacart shopper app that would be in the earnings page where the shopper can view all their earnings second step the feature would have a call to action a button with the available amount so that the shopper knows how much of their earnings is eligible for instant payment and step three would be to tap the button and transfer the available amount to their personal bank account during the phase of the project where I'm laying down the flow it helps to check out other apps that solve a similar problem so in this project I did a fair amount of competitive analysis looking at apps like venmo cash app uber driver app lyft driver app and going through their instant payment feature and seeing how they solve the problem sometimes symbols like these are used to create task flows but they are not very common in the industry especially in a work environment and so we won't be covering this in this video now moving on to wireframe flows or wire flows I quickly sketch out some very low fidelity sketches with my pen and notebook to visualize the flow more and bring dump any missing steps or things to consider such as edge cases once I've defined the screens on our part of the user flow I use tools like overflow to create a high fidelity screen flow i annotate any description of what happens at each step or screen now is your time to practice get a piece of paper and a pen and we're going to keep using the instant payment feature example except we're going to add a new user flow the user hasn't yet linked their personal bank accounts to the app what will be the flow for linking their debit card while trying to use the instant payment feature feel free to pause the video now and sketch out the flow and the low fidelity screens correlate to this scenario with this new flow of a user adding a debit card we're going to take the task flow that we already have and add a few steps in the middle after the shopper sees the available amount the user is given the option to add a Tepic card before confirming the transaction they enter in their card information and then proceed to transfer the money the final screen flow would correlate to this task flow and it should look something like this I hope this video helps clarify how user flows are used and if you have other questions feel free to comment them below this video was sponsored by spring board which is an online school that offers courses in the heart feels like UX design check out their UX career track which is a six month long program that comes with a job guarantee they pair you one-on-one with a mentor and a student advisor that help you along the way you can use my code you XCOM buns 500 for 500 dollars off see you later bye [Music]

Channel: chunbuns

Views: 252,775

Keywords: User Flows, User flow tutorial, UX tutorial, User Journeys, User Journey, ux process, ux design tutorial, user experience, user journey tutorial, ui design process, ux design process, design process, product design process, process for ui/ux design, process for product design, designer process, process for designers, how to design, what does a designer do, web design, graphic design, ux design, ui design, ui/ux design

Id: TIV1y11xz7k

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019