A flow a series of steps that, when completed, allow the participant to achieve a goal or task. When you combine enough flows that support one another — you have a product.

That’s how I’ve framed product design in my university and boot camp classes for the better part of a decade. While the tools we use will consistently change, the core of the message continues mostly intact.

Research informs your Personas and Personas inform your User Stories. From those User Stories, you can begin to envision the steps needed to complete tasks.

It’s important to remember that you already perform User Flows in daily life. Some are unique to you, while others are shared broadly across society. Your morning routines are likely full of individual flows that apply only to you, but most people board public transit in roughly the same manner all around the world.

Source: newpragmatic.com

Many of the Flows that we recognize from daily life are things that you can understand from observation. New products often lack this advantage, so they must reach for a higher standard of intuitiveness.

It is essential to realize that, in many cases, intuitive is just another name for Patterns. If your product or service leverages patterns appropriately, users will pick up on the familiarity of your product and deem it user-friendly.

The goal isn’t to make every task into a flow that users will recognize. Instead, we should aim to use common patterns where they make sense and reserve innovation for areas that involve unique problem-solving.

Resources for review

Please use the following items to guide your exercise attempt:

Article/Video	Source/Author
User Flows with FlowMapp	New Pragmatic
Converting likely failure into success	New Pragmatic

Exercise

Length: Two hours to complete.

In the last exercise, you created 20 user stories for the School Reboot project. Each story will require steps that could generate an individual User Flow.

Instead of creating User Flows for all stories, split the stories into technical and non-technical. For all technical User Stories, please create a User Flow that displays how the story could be successfully completed while also illustrating potential pitfalls.

For this task, you’ll be creating user flows using FlowMapp. FlowMapp has a free tier that is perfect for this exercise.

If you’ve never constructed user flows or used FlowMapp before, I encourage you to watch this tutorial I made for using FlowMapp.

Be sure to apply the appropriate user flow shapes to your refined iterations.

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Once complete, update your Program Journal with links to any assets produced in this exercise. Post your Journal in the #Feedback-Loop channel for review.

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Up next UX Writing