UX for Beginners

Chapter 42. What Is a Flow?

If you want users to get from A to B, you have to design how they get there. And you definitely want users to get from A to B.

Imagine your users as a crowd of people in a physical place, like Grand Central Station in New York City. There are several predictable ways the crowds will move around the station, and if you’re the architect designing the station, you have to make sure the crowd moves easily.

An app or a website is a similar concept. Thousands or millions of people need to move through your Information Architecture without getting stuck or lost, and the easier it is for them to “flow” to where they want to go, the better your design will perform and the happier the users will be.

Whether they are flowing through the checkout, through projects in your portfolio, or through the registration process on Facebook, this is important to think about.

Just like most people will go from the front door to a train, or from one train to another, your app or site will have common paths to consider, too.

Don’t Count Clicks or Pages

The architect of Grand Central Station didn’t count how many steps people would take or how many doorways they would go through, because it doesn’t matter.

It is more important to give people the right information at the right time so they know whether to turn left or right to find their train. A long hallway, like a flow with many pages, ...