Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Figuring Out Where Users Will Go When
One of the first things to work on is sketching user flows. These map out how users will
enter your site or app and the various ways they’ll navigate it. As you draw user flows,
you also want to think about when users might leave your site and why. The introduction
or home page, forms, error messages, alerts, help documentation, and all the other staples
of interactive experiences can either pull users along to stay with you or prompt them to
leave, sometimes with a bitter feeling. Never underestimate how quickly users will take
off if you let them down. You’ve got to design for every moment a user could leave your
product. You may want to start from scratch, but I’ve always found it useful to begin by
sketching the flows of competitor products. That gives me a good idea of opportunities I
may have to improve on those experiences. Take a look at the two flows that follow. The
first I traced from an existing app, and doing so allowed me to think of many ways to
simplify the flow. In my flow, there are many fewer pages and transitions.
Always keep in mind that you want to play the part of a narrator here, and make sure
that the product leads users from place to place clearly and never leaves them lost. In a
good novel or film, the plot is tightly constructed and all of the story lines work together
clearly to drive the story forward, with no plot developments that are confusing or just
tangential. With a site or app, of course, we’re most often not dealing with a story that
moves forward in just one way like a novel or film. Users are free to engage in just about
any way they want and roam all around in the order they please. This is why it’s essential
that in crafting your flows, you make sure users can always navigate easily to core flows
and contextual demands of where they want to go next.
For example, users may want to come back to an application after an email or other
notification is received. This would mean that you’d want to let them reenter the app
sideways, rather than always having to enter from the beginning. Each of the different
paths for all user goals should be thought out to ensure the experience suits every user.
This involves putting your personas to use as well as constantly reminding yourself of the
business goals. For example, you might want to allow for “power users,” people who
come to your site all the time and want to go directly to one specific part of it,
sidestepping some of the content or more basic navigational UI. But the business you’re
designing for may require that you not allow bypassing ads or sign-up/sign-in roadblocks,
so you’d create some shortcuts for power users but not ones that take them past those.