UX for Business

A Flow

One Type of Information Architecture: A Flow

Now that you can design a page for a purpose, let’s link a few pages together to make a flow! Most of the pages you ever design will be organized as a flow or a structure (which we will learn about in the section “A Structure”).

If you have signed up for anything on the internet, you have experienced a flow. It often includes forms. The buttons at the end of each step probably say Continue or Next. A flow usually creates or destroys something like a purchase, or an account, or posts a video of you lighting yourself on fire in the shower.

What really defines a flow is that you always do the steps in the same order. A flow can be easily diagrammed using a flow chart that illustrates the main steps or decisions that are made during a flow.

But before we get into all that, let’s talk about conversion.

Conversion

A word you will hear a lot in UX. Conversion is the percentage of people that complete a flow (or any start-to-finish process). For example, if 100 people put something in their cart and 3 of those people actually pay, your checkout conversion rate is 3%.

This whole idea of probability applies to conversion too. 100% of the users started the flow, but only 3% finished the flow, and if you measure how many people are ...