User Flow.

A useful user flow does not start on the home page. It starts where people actually arrive: on a subpage from a Google search, via a link in an email, via an ad. Then come steps, decision points with yes or no branches, system states such as loading or saving and finally exits: goal reached, abandonment, switch to another channel. The flow needs to be distinguished from two neighbours: the customer journey spans several channels and phases over weeks, while a wireframe shows the layout of a single station.

The real value lies in the branches nobody likes drawing. What happens with an invalid entry? What if the person is not logged in? What if the search returns no result, the form is submitted twice or the file is too large? These cases account for a considerable part of the development effort and are regularly skipped in the design. A flow that only shows the ideal path shifts the work into implementation, where it is improvised under time pressure; that is where forms come from that show an error message without saying which field is meant.

A concrete case: a service website receives most of its traffic via one subpage. The drawn flow shows that the person is looking for a price range there, does not find it, switches to the home page, goes from there into the navigation structure and only reaches the contact form with a third click, where the request has to be explained all over again. Two measures follow directly: a price range on the entry page and a form right there with the service area already pre-filled. Both are measurable, because the number of steps to an enquiry is known before and after.

A flow remains an assumption until it has been tested. It is compared with actual paths from analytics, with the drop-off points in a form and with usability testing on real tasks. This often reveals a missing step nobody planned for, such as returning to the overview to compare two offers. To be honest about the limits: for a three-page website, a flow diagram is unnecessary effort; one sentence per goal is enough there. The work becomes worthwhile for multi-step processes such as configuration, booking, registration or ordering. How we set this up in a project is described on the page UX Agency Zurich.