How to create a user experience flow chart (UX Flow Chart)

Next up in our web and mobile development tutorial series, here we'll examine the process of moving from a User Interface Spec to the construction of a flow chart that describes the detailed user experience (UX) through the app. This is where the engineer(s) and creative(s) must work closely together to decide what kind of software tools can best support the intended interfaces and click/swipe behavior, down to every last tab, tooltip, lightbox, icon, etc…

Author's note: check out Startup Rocket's new web app and ops framework for founders spinning up new ventures. The UX flow chart step is a critical part of the "create" stage.

Also, FYI, I wrote the first couple dozen tutorials in this series a few years ago and I'm in the process of updating the content to reflect the evolution of best practices in the industry. Please let me know if you see anything I missed that should be updated. Thanks!

Flow charting software

While there are plenty of flow charting tools available out there, we've found that using Google Docs' Drawing software is more than suitable for our needs because:

While Google Drawings aren't explicitly designed for flow-charting (i.e. one drawback is that arrows to nodes don't automatically move when nodes are moved), we've found that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

A flow chart format friendly to UI designers AND developers

Below is the simple format we use in a Google Drawing that forces the engineer(s) and creative(s) to think carefully through exactly how content (for web apps) will be presented to users, and allows everyone to click on a node to view the latest wireframe or mockup:

In this example, each of the arrow types represent a critical decision that developers (especially) need to speak into.

What is also important to note is that yellow boxes (nodes) represent new pages or elements of the UX that, in our preferred system, always link to URLs of the current wireframe or mockup of that node.

We'll discuss specifics of wireframes and mockups later in this tutorial series, but for our purposes here we've found that linking nodes directly to URLs of images hosted on Google Drive is helpful because the collaboration tools to comment on specific parts of the image are excellent (e.g. you can draw a box around a specific element and start a discussion about it that your team can have over direct email … and Google will keep record of the conversation in the comment window for that file. It's pretty sweet.)

The ‘Our Agenda App' flow chart

So, moving right along then, here is the specific example of our flow chart based on the UI Spec we created previously for the app we are building step-by-step together in this tutorial series:

Here are the key things we had in mind while constructing this flow chart:

If you are reading this and prepping to build out your own UX flow chart, note carefully how we did both the “Logged in?” conditional and the “Dashboard Welcome -> Dashboard transition.” These types of relatively-complex scenarios can be visually explained different ways, but the key idea is that all your nodes cover everything your UI designer needs to wireframe/mockup and that he/she understands exactly what's expected. As long as your team is on the same page, then you are good to go.

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In our next post in this series we'll begin by building out the wireframes for each of our nodes (Yellow Boxes) in our UX flow chart. Previous post: How to create a user interface specifications document (UI Spec).


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