User Flow Diagrams

28 April 2023

What is a User Flow Diagram?

The user flow is the journey a user embarks on when they first arrive on your product. Often this begins with a homepage and leads to the registration followed by some variation of the onboarding process. Mapping this journey out in form of a diagram can be a useful way to put your designs into perspective and highlight the different scenarios within the journey. They are particularly useful when there are multiple entry points, when a product has various levels of complexity or when you have multiple platforms connected to each other.

Like wireframes and prototypes, the user flow diagram can and should be tested to ensure it flows correctly and solves the problems you are trying to fix.

Experience

I have found having a user flow diagram especially useful in the past when reviewing user feedback. A perfect example is when users complained that the onboarding journey of Giki Zero was too long. To improve this user flow, I was able to work with the engineering team to highlight what points of the flow they were dropping off and get an idea of the maximum number of steps and clicks a user is likely to put up with.

User flow diagrams have also been useful when demonstrating the user journey to developers instead of having them make assumptions based off the designs.

Conclusion

While user flow diagrams can be time consuming and difficult to translate when different types of users exist, the pros heavily outweigh the cons. If you’re looking to create a user flow diagram, I’d recommend using Miro, Figjam or Draw.io.