Designing a User Flow
Planning by designing a user flow dramatically improves a design. It allows us to identify what features are needed and what might be missing.
The first thing to do is identify what you need to build. What do you want your user to accomplish? After identifying that, start listing out what you believe will be the order they will accomplish that goal. Once you line up everything you think they would need to do, see if there is anything missing. After you are done listing out everything you believe the user needed to go through and every action they could possibly take to accomplish their goal, it’s time to look into your competitors and see how they built the user flow.
The reason it’s important to look into the competitors’ user flow is because they probably tested it and tried to optimize it as much as they could. This doesn’t mean to copy what they did but instead, adapt and improve from it.
Figure out the features you need and draft different designs of the features. Pick and choose the features you want to keep in case you don’t need them all. Sometimes simple is better.
Organize the features and prioritize what the users need the most first. Start building the flow by sorting the order of content the users will go through.
After sorting, revise and check if it is the fastest and most efficient flow for the users. Is there anything missing? How can we simplify this flow? If you cannot simplify it any further, you can move on to designing it on paper to check if the flow will make sense to you.
