#user-flow

Too often when people design experiences, they start from the screen. They think “oh, people need to do x” and they start laying out a screen that will support that task. The problem is that not enough designers think through what that “task” really entails. Tasks don’t live in a vacuum. People come to them from somewhere. They go somewhere afterward. They perform them in different environments with different levels of attention and varying amounts of time. An interaction on a screen represents a single moment in time. The user interaction encompasses that moment and everything that surrounds that moment. Good interfaces take these differences into account. They support most of the likely behaviors and environments and prevent the truly undesirable ones. Good design doesn’t lose data or state just because a user has performed an action in a surprising way. Good designers need to think through all possible flows and take user context into consideration before even thinking about screen interactions.