Web | UI/UX Design | Motion
Web | UI/UX Design | Motion
That’s why we all got into this business, right? To make a difference in the World? Some of my favorite colleagues back in design school at Ferris State used to gather at this local gem called Schuberg’s and talk about all things graphic design (and life) over pints and quarts of cheap beer and Schuburgers. Back then, we knew we were naive and idealistic, and we didn’t care. My friend Gretchen used to say “The World was (our) oyster” back then, and it really did feel like it.
At this point I usually find it helpful to review the “Big 5” UX artifacts that we UX designers like to use as a toolset to plan for a new (or rebuilt) website or application. These are:
At one time in my career there were zero specialized tools for the Big Five. Now it’s safe to say there are multiple good, specialized and cross-OS tools for every one of them. With capable tools like this, there is no excuse to skip any of the steps in the UX discovery process because of lack of tools, only lack of time. And lack of time is a faulty excuse at best, considering the re-work that will have to be done if a site or application is built without discovery and that work has to be re-done during a re-build of the site or app.
| Artifact | Old Tool(s) | New Tool(s) |
| Site Maps | Microsoft Visio | Figma |
| Personas | MS Word | Google Docs, Bard |
| Wire frames | Visio, Illustrator | Figma, InVision |
| User Flows | Visio, PowerPoint | Figma |
| Prototypes | Axure, InVision | Adobe XD, Invision, Figma |
User Flows are often used in the same sentence as User Stories in UX, and there is a reason for that. I’ve spoken elsewhere, at pretty good length, of the importance of story, in work, and in our lives in general. Stories are how we work things out, and how we pass down knowledge through our generations. User Flows in the UX process are exactly the same. We tell the story of a real user, what they’re looking to accomplish in our system, their journey, hardships, and all they pass along the way in their journey.
Joseph Campbell has been writing about “The Hero’s Journey” and its role in story in our cultures for decades now, and generally these same pieces of a story take place in good user flows – also often referred to as journey maps – and make for better stories and better UX discovery.
User flow diagrams are meant to tell stories. In most cases, stories of the journey that a user will take when interacting with a system, website or application. Why? What makes them a necessary step in the User Experience discovery story? After seeing through the process from beginning to end many, many times now in the 20-some years I’ve been designing products, the value of User Flows is obvious, but that’s not to say it’s always been that way. I’ve worked in many agencies and web design shops where User Flows are skipped over for the sake of time.
In every single case, we the frontend developers, developers, or website builders, with whatever combination of names we’ve taken on, have done some sort of User Flow ourselves at some point in the development process. Whether its an official, pretty diagram in a tool like Visio or a napkin sketch, it only makes sense to want to see a sort of map for the tasks users will be using our systems for. And over and over again, the system, the app, the checkout process works better, naturally, for the process. You can see it in beautifully designed checkout processes on websites like Zappos.com or Amazon.com. You can see it in beautifully usable applications like Lime (ridesharing for bikes and scooters), and in award winning games like any of those made by Rockstar games.