Defining a user's flow - Sketch Tutorial

- [Instructor] In UX, flow refers to how users will complete steps through the experience. UX designers scope out how flows are interrelated at a high level because you don't want to design everything at once. For example, let's look at the steps involved in paying your bill online. At a high level, you'll log in, pay your bill and receive a confirmation that the bill was paid. When we go a layer deeper, there's more details we have to account for. If you're a new user, you'll have to create an account. If you're a returning user, then you'll have to sign in. If the user forgot their password, they have to go through a separate password recovery flow. To create an optimal flow for users, we'll need to do three things. The first is to understand the customer. The second thing is to benchmark competitive UX experiences and third, derive use cases and scenarios. Delving into understanding the customer means that we need to understand their needs, wants and desires for completing tasks. In a user-centered design process, we engage users and gather insights at the beginning of the project and gather feedback as the design shapes out. If there's a current process or flow, we'll want to model the experience in a flow diagram to understand how the current experience is working and where the issues lie. This helps us get a fuller picture of what the issues are before trying to fix them. Next, we conduct a competitive analysis. Competitive analysis in UX is benchmarking flows of other products and services. The goal of a competitive analysis it to look for common paradigms and patterns that users might be familiar with and common activities. Understanding the competitive landscape is crucial in deriving expertise in your product area. It helps us understand why our flows and designs deviate from others and which patterns are canon. After talking to users and reviewing the competitive landscape, we'll want to start defining a set of activities or scenarios. Usually, if you're working on a project team, this is done as a team or between a product manager and a UX designer. This exercise outputs a series of requirements and use cases. I'm using the term use cases informally and what I mean by this is a representation of the business function or process and how the user engages with that function or process. For example, for a bill payment flow, we may want to create a use case that captures the need for the user to enter their credentials to log into the system. That might look something like this. Returning customer needs to enter username and password to access account. When written from the user's point of view, it may say something like as a returning customer, I want to enter a username and password to access my account. Depending on your development process, this might be in the form of user scenarios and stories. For more information, you can search LinkedIn Learning for videos on user stories. From these use cases, we can start to think about the design and organize the use cases into flows and discreet areas of focus. So defining flows requires customer understanding, competitive analysis and defining activities and use cases to develop a vision for the design.