What Is a User Flow in UX Design? +Benefits, Types (2024)
- Published:
- Updated: November 15, 2024
If you work on a product team, you know all product iterations must consider the holistic user experience. Understanding how each change to your platform fits into the entire UX can be a product operations challenge, which is precisely why user flows are helpful for product managers, designers, and developers.
Essentially, user flows allow teams to thoughtfully plan the user experience and streamline communication throughout the UX team to ensure that each product iteration improves the overall UX.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about user flows and provide specific examples of how to use them in the product development process.
User Flow vs. User Journey
User flows is a chart or diagram that helps to visualize typical patterns and paths users follow within an application or platform. Visualizing user flows allows your product team to create a more intuitive experience where users can easily accomplish their goals and get value from your platform.
Typically, user flows include:
- A starting point
- The content that is shown to users
- The different options that users have for actions at each point in the flow
- The CTAs that users need to click to move forward
- An endpoint
In the example below, you can see a user flow for users paying their account balance. After logging in, a user could take many different actions, so the diagram branches off into different action paths. Showing all potential action paths is a key element of user flows.
User flows can also be analyzed and mapped data-driven using product analytics software. You can monitor metrics like time-to-value and identify user friction and dropoff points throughout each flow. Doing so allows you to react by creating more effective user onboarding experiences and in-app tutorials to guide your users through contextual user flow.
What Is the Difference Between a User Flow and a User Journey?
While user flows and journeys show user interactions with a platform, they have different functions. A user journey map considers the customer’s motivations and feelings, and a user flow focuses more on the technical steps that a user can take from a specific entry point.
Product teams will find that creating and maintaining user flows and journey maps greatly help product development. Your user journey map will help you understand what your users are trying to accomplish, how they feel, and what’s motivating them at every point in their customer experience. Your user flows will help you understand what you’re offering users at every stage of that journey – and whether or not you’re genuinely answering their needs.
Although user flows and user journey maps are different, they complement each other and give product teams a complete picture of their platform’s overall user experience.
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Why User Flows Are Important to UX Design
Visualizing the interaction between your users and your platform with user flows is the place to start when considering and planning product iterations. This ensures you consider the entire user experience and offer your users more value.
How? Here are some of the most beneficial aspects of utilizing user flows on your product team:
1. Reduces mistakes and misunderstandings between product managers, designers, and developers
User flows visualize everything a user encounters: CTAs, action options, and content. With accurate user flows, you can be sure that you’re working with cross-functional teams who all have access to the same information and reduce mistakes or misunderstandings as you implement product changes.
2. Allows product teams to identify and fix user issues before shipping product changes
Think of product changes as akin to dominoes—any iteration is likely to affect something else in the platform and impact the overall user experience. When you use user flows to visualize the full flow for each potential action, you can identify what each change will affect before you ship any changes. Your team can ask important questions and solve problems beforehand, avoiding any issues with the user experience post-release.
3. Highlights user journey inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit for UX improvements
Visualizing the user’s process in a simple flowchart allows you to find unnecessary steps and declutter the flow so that users can perform their desired action faster from the first moments of your user onboarding experience.
For example, you can use process mapping tools to visualize the user’s process in an easy-to-understand way and perform a user path analysis to identify friction points. Your findings will likely give you an actionable list of experience clutter or unnecessarily complicated flows that you can fix and reap the benefits in your KPIs.
Let’s walk through an example of an e-commerce store check-out experience to see exactly what we’re discussing.
In our first product flow iteration, users add items to their cart and click ‘check out.’ However, before they can purchase, they are presented with a screen with recommended products. After that, a pop-up prompts users to spend more for free shipping.
In your product analytics platform, you’d most likely observe that these interruptions hurt shopping cart checkout conversion. You could easily catch this when looking at your checkout user flow. Then, you and your team could consider iterations that offer additional products and free shipping—but with less likelihood of standing between users and cart conversion.
4. Promotes user-centric design
UX and product design require a cross-functional team with opinions about the best way to optimize your product. It’s easy to get lost in the design process and forget the most important part: the user.
User flows ground your project, ensuring it doesn’t go off the rails and lose track of the user. By getting the team’s feedback and approval on your user flow from the beginning of the process, everyone is committed to a design that keeps the user’s best interest and goals in mind – improving overall user adoption.
Types of User Flow Charts
The most common types of user flow charts are task flows, wire flows, and general user flows. Each chart maps flow differently and are helpful in different situations.
Let’s examine each and how to know when they’re the right choice for your team.
1. Task Flow
Task flows focus on one feature or task a user can perform and don’t show other pathways or variations. They’re typically linear charts illustrating flows where users have to enter at the same point and accomplish a task similarly.
In the task flow example below, we’re looking at a user buying a hoodie in an online store. Notice that each user needs to go through the same steps to make a purchase; there is no variation in what a user can choose to do if they want to purchase a hoodie:
The main advantage of task flows is that they’re incredibly simple. You should use task flows when your team works on one specific flow with straightforward steps and without multiple options. For example, task flows are often used in PRDs when product stakeholders want to show a particular task being iterated on in one clear visual.
2. Wire Flow
Wire flows combine wireframes and flowcharts. Instead of using shapes to convey movement, they use wireframes of each page or screen within a given flow.
Wire flows add page context to UX flows since what users see on each screen significantly impacts their experience throughout any given flow. Simply put, wire flows allow you and your team to see a flow exactly how a user experiences it.
In the example below, we’re still looking at the flow of a user who is purchasing a hoodie online, but this time, we’re getting the full visual context of the user experience:
The primary benefit of wire flows is that all stakeholders can see what a user sees as they ideate, build, and implement product iterations. This increases your team’s likelihood of designing more holistic solutions that benefit your users.
If that’s the case, why wouldn’t you always use wire flows instead of the more simplistic task flow? One way to think about this is that task flows are most helpful in setting the stage at the outset of a product initiative. They clearly show what flow you’ll work on and what steps it includes.
On the other hand, wire flows are most valuable when your team is doing the work – designing and developing, for example. This ensures that once they roll up their sleeves and start building solutions, they do it with the holistic user experience at the top of mind.
3. User Flow
User flow charts expand on what task flows and wire flows offer—they’re the most detailed, all-inclusive type of user flow chart. User flows analyze and map how users interact with your product by showing different potential user paths in detail for various user tasks and goals.
All-inclusive user flows, such as the example below, typically include a flow chart showing various choices that users can make throughout any given flow, in addition to having visuals that give anyone looking at the chart a sense of what a user sees:
The general user flow, as opposed to wire flows and task flows, has variations, visuals, and detailed visual and textual information about the user experience.
The most detailed version of user flows is helpful when doing your design and development work, similar to wire flows. However, they’re also helpful when looking at an experience in immense detail, such as brainstorming product iterations or aligning on the nitty-gritty details of a product initiative.
Examples of Common User Flows
While every product has unique flows, several expected flows within SaaS platforms are essential for the overall user experience and the ability to meet critical KPIs.
Here are a few examples of everyday user flows that could be great starting points for your team to get started with building and maintaining user flows that help you do excellent product work:
- Registration Flow: how users create an account
- Login Flow: how users log in after they already created an account
- Onboarding Flow: how new users learn your platform and start getting value from it
- Password Recovery Flow: how users who have forgotten their password can create a new one and log in again
- Checkout Flow: how users make a purchase, which on a SaaS platform may be their initial conversion or an account upgrade
- Feedback and Support Flows: how users submit product feedback and/or get help with any issues that they’re experiencing
- Report Generation Flows: how users create a report or other shareable deliverable on your platform to share with others
- Export Flows: how users export whatever reports or other deliverables they can create on your platform
- Collaboration Flows: how users loop others into their workflows on your platform to do collaborative work
- Comparison Flows: how users visualize data comparisons – for example, comparing this week’s metrics to last week’s or the results of two different campaigns
You can review the above examples and decide what’s relevant to your platform, but also consider key flows specific to your platform. Maintaining user flow charts for all your key flows will help your team do its best work in the areas of your product that matter most.
Best Practices for Creating User Flow Charts
We’re guessing that by now, you’re more than ready to either start creating your initial user flows or to dust off and update your existing ones. In this section, we’ll walk you through a 5 step process for creating user flow charts.
1. Get the actual information organized before you create a visual
Before you create the hallmark visualizations of user flows, you’ll want to make sure that you have all of the following information laid out in one place (we recommend a simple document):
- Which flows do you want to build or update? We recommend starting with the essential tasks and flows that you know influence business KPIs, like conversion.
- For each one, write out the entire flow in words. Remember that some flows will have varying options and paths users can take. Include them all so your flow charts will be accurate and nuanced.
2. Decide on standardized design elements for your user flows
User flows typically take the form of a flowchart using consistent shapes for different aspects of each flow. This ensures that your team understands each element of your user flow chart. Shapes represent screens and actions like decision points, entry points, and movement. As you can see in the image below, ovals, rectangles, diamonds, and arrows are commonly used.
Before sharing your user flows with everyone at your organization, create and include a key to the design elements like the one in the example below.
3. Start creating each user flow with the relevant entry point
First things first—when it comes to user flow charts, entry points are your starting point. What are the potential entry points for each task or flow? There may be one or more, so create a linear journey for each.
Common entry points include a login screen, the homepage, a landing page, or a pricing plan, but specific tasks may start from a particular CTA or somewhere else entirely. Take each flow one by one, methodically finding all of the entry points.
4. Map out the rest of each flow
Once you’ve visualized the entry points for each flow, you’re ready to map each chart fully. In this step, be sure to:
- Show processes or actions such as ‘login’ or ‘access account information’ with a specific shape, such as a rectangle
- Indicate decisions that users need to make with a particular shape, such as a diamond in the previous example
- Illustrate where the user is headed based on decisions with arrows
It’s important to limit each user flow chart to one desired action. Adding too many places to branch off will distract your team and confuse things for the clarity and alignment you want.
We recommend using software to streamline the user flow creation since manual options can be tedious and time-consuming. Popular diagramming and flow chart creation tools include Lucidchart, JustInMind, and Figma.
5. Analyze and react to how users move through each flow
The best thing about user flows is that they cannot only provide clarity for your team, helping them work holistically to benefit the user experience but also give you critical insights about your users and lead you to essential product iterations.
Once you’ve created user flow charts, your team can use them for clarity as they work, but monitoring user behavior for each flow is crucial for reaping the benefits. You’ll want to monitor analytics to look at things like:
- Where can we see user friction in each flow?
- Where in each flow do users drop off?
- Which point in each flow correlates with retention, conversion, or other important metrics?
Analyzing the user behavior for each flow will allow you to create a list of specific product iterations that will help your users successfully complete each key flow.
If you’re using software to help implement your user flows, these will often show user behavior and insights about their challenges. Whatfix’s Analytics can show precisely when and where users drop off during their path.
With this data, you can hypothesize the “why” behind user dropoffs and poor flow completion rates and use Whatfix DAP to launch in-app tutorials to assist users at key friction points, guiding them through critical user flows with Smart Tips, Flows, and more.
Fix user flow issues and create a more intuitive UX with a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP)
If you’re looking for a way to encourage users to complete your user flows and achieve their in-app goals, a digital adoption platform (DAP) can help. Not only can you track user behavior like we mentioned in the previous section, but you can also use a DAP to react to what you learn from the data.
For example, if you notice that users drop off at a certain point in a particular flow and your hypothesis is that they’re confused about what to do next, Whatfix’s Flow feature provides a no-code editor to create in-app guidance that show users where to click next, how to find needed information, and nudges user to overcome friction points.
Whatfix allows teams to create in-app content such as beacons, tooltips, feedback surveys, knowledge bases, onboarding flows, product tours, and walkthroughs—all customizable to your branding without the need for development or coding knowledge. Since it’s a no-code solution, you can quickly solve critical problems in your user flows.
With Whatfix Analytics, implement no-code event tracking to capture user behavior and analyze product usage.
Segment users into cohorts to target them with contextual in-app content or compare them against one another to understand friction points. Design optimal user paths and identify areas of inefficiency with Journeys. Understand where users are dropping off and improve conversions with Funnels. Capture any custom user action or event and use AI-powered Trends Analysis to analyze experiences and recommend action items.
Ready to get started? Schedule a Whatfix demo today to get the analytics and adoption support you need to maximize your user flows!
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