UX Sketching Exercises for Ideation Part 2: Sketching flows
Sketching out user flows
A user flow is a sequence of steps a persona takes inside an app or on a website to reach a goal. (If you are interested in this topic in more details, check out my UX Knowledge Base Sketch about user flows.)
When we think about user experience, one possible classification is that there are 4 levels:
- user journey
- user flow
- layout
- UI element
(Of course it’s just one type of the possible classifications.) This UX Knowledge Piece Sketch is about 2 collaborative ideation activities that focus on sketching out user flows:
- thumbnail sketches
- master flows.
Thumbnail sketches
These provide a high-level overview of a project (or a task at hand). The 2 main goals are:
- showing what the key parts or key messages are on each screen
- indicating how the user can move forward towards her goal.
A thumbnail sketch is a quick rough sketch, it does not contain
- individual detailed UI elements
- transitions
- content / microcopy details.
For instance in case of a booking website these might be 4 steps of a flow:
- search: when and where
- search engine result page that contains the places that matches the query
- place details page
- booking form
And due to the low-fidelity level, it does not contain how the search could work or what we should show on the place details page (and in what order).
Of course you can create thumbnail sketches on your own, but if it is done collaboratively, your team will be able to get a more complete high-level overview quite effectively.
One technique for cumulating your ideas is creating master flows.
Master flows
Creating master flows means that you work alone together, then you combine your quick thumbnail sketches to map out a — hopefully — more complete flow.
This is how it works:
- give 8 sticky notes to each team member (of course you can modify this number), the important thing is that everyone should get a different color
- select a flow, the associated persona and one of her core needs, goals
- set a timer (timeboxing is helpful in case of a collaborative team activity) — e.g. 8 minutes
- the goal of the exercise is to quickly sketch out the main steps of the flow individually
After the individual sketching, team members combine their flows:
- first, they search for the entry point
- then they find the second step, the third step, finally the exit point
As a result of this mapping process, they will see that:
- there are steps that contain only one sticky note — meaning that only one team member thought about it
- there are steps that appear on each sticky note color (meaning that everyone included it)
The whole point of the exercise is to serve as a conversation starter, e.g.:
- Is there any missing points?
- What are the key parts?
- Should we combine some of the steps?
- Did we discover any new directions?
An example master flow
While this exercise was not about a user flow and it was not about a digital experience, this example nicely illustrates the method: this is a master flow of creating a toast:
Everyone got 5 sticky notes, there were the 5 of us, so we had 25 sticky notes, and we ended up with a 14-step long quite detailed flow that was much-much more detailed than the flows created by each individual. (If you are interested in the context of this workshop, read my article here.)
Next steps
As a possible next step we can zoom-in, select some parts of the flow, and then sketch out the page or screen level (e.g. using solution sketches) or some individual UI elements (e.g. conducting some rounds of Crazy8s).
Related sketches
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