# User Flow

> The step-by-step path a person takes through a product to complete a task, including the decisions, branches, and dead ends along the way.

- Category: Process & Methods
- Canonical: https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/user-flow

A user flow is the path somebody takes through a product to finish one task: every step, every decision point, every branch, and every way it can fail. It answers what happens next, which is a different question from what goes where.

That distinction places it between two neighbours. [Information architecture](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/information-architecture) and the [sitemap](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/sitemap) describe structure, the floor plan. A flow is a route through it. [Wireframing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/wireframing) comes after, because the flow decides how many screens exist and what each has to accomplish.

## Draw the failures, not the happy path

The default flow diagram shows somebody doing everything correctly and succeeding. That version is a picture of an assumption.

The branches worth drawing are the ones teams skip:

- **No permission.** The user is not allowed to do this. What do they see, and can they ask somebody who is?
- **No data.** The account is new, or empty, or the relevant list has nothing in it.
- **Invalid input.** What is caught, when it is caught, and whether anything they typed survives.
- **Interruption.** They close the tab midway and return tomorrow. Does the product remember?
- **Someone else acted first.** In a multi-user product, the thing being edited may have changed under them.
- **The request failed.** The server said no. What happens to their work.

Each of these becomes a real screen. Drawing them costs minutes; discovering them during a build costs a negotiation, and the resolution is whatever the engineer decided at the time.

## Counting the steps

A flow makes cost visible in a way that a set of screens does not, and three counts are worth taking.

**Steps to the outcome.** Laid end to end, a nine-step flow argues against itself. This is the fastest way to have the conversation about scope.

**Decisions asked of the user.** Every choice is work, and choices made on the user's behalf with a sensible default are the cheapest improvement available in most flows.

**Waits.** Points where somebody is waiting for a system, an approval or another person. In B2B these dominate: a flow with two waits for a colleague's action takes days regardless of how many screens it has.

## Flows in multi-user products

Consumer flows follow one person. B2B flows routinely hand off, and the handoff is where they break.

A common shape: an admin invites a colleague, the colleague accepts, the admin assigns permissions, the colleague does the work. Four steps, two people, and at least two points where the whole thing can stall for a week because somebody did not see an email.

Drawing these as one continuous line hides the problem. Drawing a lane per role makes the handoffs visible, and the useful question at each one becomes what happens if this person does nothing. Most products answer it with silence, which means the flow simply ends and nobody is told.

## Notation, and how much of it you need

Flows get drawn in every notation from formal diagram standards to boxes and arrows on a whiteboard, and the formality rarely correlates with usefulness.

A working minimum is four shapes: a screen, a decision, an action the system takes, and an end state. Anything beyond that is worth adding only when somebody has asked a question it answers. Elaborate notation makes diagrams that look authoritative and get read by nobody, which is worse than a rough one people argue over.

Two conventions do pay for themselves. Give every end state a name, including the unhappy ones, because a flow whose branches trail off has not decided what happens there. And mark which steps are the product's and which are a person's, since a flow that waits on a human is a different kind of flow from one that waits on a server, and only one of them can be made faster by engineering.

## In practice

A team is asked to improve a slow invitation flow and starts by drawing it.

The successful path has four steps and looks reasonable. The branches tell a different story. An invitation to somebody without a company email address fails silently. An invitation to somebody who already has an account on another workspace goes to a screen that says access denied, with no explanation. If the admin closes the tab before assigning a role, the colleague arrives to an account that can see nothing, and there is no notification to anybody that this has happened.

None of the three appear in the funnel, because each one produces a person who never reached the next event and no record of why.

The redesign that follows is mostly not about the four steps. It is about the branches that were never drawn, and one of them accounts for a good share of invitations that go nowhere.

## Where teams get it wrong

- **Drawing only success.** The optimistic path is the one that needs the least design.
- **One line for a multi-person process.** Handoffs are where B2B flows stall, and a single line makes them invisible.
- **Flow after screens.** Sequence assembled from whatever screens already exist.
- **Ignoring re-entry.** Users leave and come back. A flow that only works in one sitting is a flow that mostly fails.
- **Confusing the flow with the funnel.** The funnel counts the main path and is blind to every branch, including the ones people are falling into.

## Related terms

- [Information Architecture](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/information-architecture)
- [Wireframing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/wireframing)
- [Conversion Funnel](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/conversion-funnel)
- [Onboarding](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/onboarding)

## Learn more

- [UI/UX design for B2B SaaS](https://www.themasterly.com/services/ui-ux-design)

## FAQ

**What is a user flow?**

The sequence of steps somebody takes to finish one task in a product, including every decision point, branch and failure along the way. It answers what happens next rather than what goes where, which is the question a sitemap answers.

**What is the difference between a user flow and a customer journey map?**

A user flow covers one task inside the product, at screen level, usually in one sitting. A journey map covers the whole relationship across channels and months, including emails, sales calls and everything happening outside the product. One is a route through a building, the other is the story of the tenancy.

**What is the difference between a user flow and a funnel?**

A flow is the designed path with all its branches. A funnel is a measurement of how many people got through the main one. The flow tells you what could happen; the funnel tells you what did, and it usually ignores the branches entirely.

**How detailed should a user flow be?**

Detailed enough to include the failures. A flow that shows only the successful path is a diagram of an optimistic assumption. The branches where somebody lacks permission, has no data, or enters something invalid are exactly the parts that get built badly when they are not drawn.

**Do you draw flows before or after wireframes?**

Before. The flow decides how many screens there are and what each one must accomplish; the wireframe arranges the contents of one. Drawing screens first tends to produce a sequence assembled from whatever screens got made.

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