Creating a Seamless User Flow: A Step-by-Step Guide
UX design plays a vital role in ensuring users have a great and positive experience while interacting with a web product. One fundamental aspect of UX design is a seamless user flow. Many designers often misunderstand user flow’s importance, which ends with poorly designed products.
User flows are essential UX tools that ensure visitors navigate easily through a website or app from the entry point to the exit. An effective user flow provides an exceptional experience and increases conversion rates in the long run.
Whether you are an experienced UX designer or a beginner trying to grasp the user flow concept, mastering it might take time and practice. Thus, you can research more and read this Eleken’s article and other online resources to broaden your knowledge.
This article guides you on creating a seamless user flow in simple steps.
What Is a User Flow?
User flow is the pathway that users follow when interacting with an application or website. It also refers to a visual map of the user journey from the entry point to the end of their interaction.
Also known as a UX flowchart, it is a visual representation of a customer from the onboarding phase until the final action, such as, for instance, signing up or buying an item.
In a nutshell, user flow centers on the path a user takes throughout your digital product’s use. It covers the entire journey before customers access your website or use your application until they leave your resource.
Steps to Create a Seamless User Flow
Many designers find user flow creation quite challenging. But with the right approach and skills, it is a simple process. You only need to carry out extensive user research, understand the value of your product, and tap into your creative mind to create a seamless user flow.
Here are the steps you can follow.
#1 Understand your target customer journey
Before you start the process, it is imperative to understand your customer’s type and category. Create interactive buyer personas to know your target users and their expectations. Buyer personas are hypothetical representations of your target customers. These profiles reveal their needs, expectations, and behaviors towards your product.
Buyer personas are vital since they help decide on the content you should add to specific product sections. These decisions will help persuade customers to proceed to the next phase of the user flow.
Moreover, you can build a user journey map to show each step of a customer’s interaction with your product. You will gain valuable insights about your customers and learn how to enhance their experience.
#2 Define and align your goals to your customer’s goals
Your product has different sections, and each has a different goal. For instance, your goals may be to attract users to sign up, subscribe, make a purchase, or register for an upcoming webinar. However, these goals might not align with your customer’s objectives.
Thus, you should go back to the drawing board and refer to the buyer personas and user journey map. Study the pain points experienced by your customers at different stages during an interaction. This approach will help you define your customers’ goals, and you can alter the user flow to align it with what they need and expect.
The trick is understanding your customers’ needs and persuading them to follow with your product until the exit point.
#3 Find out how customers locate you
Where does your user flow begin? To understand its genesis, you must determine how users locate your web product. Evaluate the user journey maps and note the potential avenues customers use to find your business, website, or application.
Common channels you may include in your flow chart are organic searches, direct traffic, social media links, emails, paid advertisements, referral websites, traditional mass media, etc.
Users’ entry points to your website will reveal more about their current needs and intention to follow through to the exit point. For instance, a customer accessing your website knows what they want to purchase and will move swiftly to the payment section. Conversely, users who find you through social media or paid ads might not be aware of your product and are only curious to know what you offer.
#4 Find out the information users need
What information do your customers need to know? You should figure out how to improve user experience and generate more leads to your site. Examine the buyer personas and user journey to draw out essential information to meet your customers’ needs. Thus, it is imperative to understand the pain points and how to include clear CTAs to convince users to complete tasks.
Furthermore, you need to know when to add timely information at each stage to ensure customers get the right content to proceed throughout your designed flow.
#5 Visualize the user flow
In this phase, you already have a detailed description of your customers’ needs and expectations at each stage, from entry to exit. So, you can now visualize the user flow and design it physically or digitally on a whiteboard. Using a software program is also acceptable since it allows smooth collaboration and is easy to create.
Irrespective of the design tool, you should incorporate standard user flow shapes and symbols in your diagram. For instance, oval symbols signify the beginning and end of a flow, rectangles represent steps, and arrows depict the customer’s path. Diamonds are the decisions customers make at each stage, and the parallelograms show where a customer should enter their information.
#6 Get feedback, review, and finalize the flow
After designing the user flow chart, you can share it with your design team, stakeholders, and other departmental members. You will get positive or negative feedback depending on how well you’ve met the business goals or product-related strategy. Use that feedback to streamline the user flow and introduce changes where necessary.
Final Take
Once you complete the corrections, present the final diagram to the product development team for approval. Finally, you can conduct user testing with real customers and implement their feedback to enhance UX design on your app or website.
