During the process of mobile application design, there are two core concepts that come up time and again. The first is function – in order to be successful, an app needs to be able to do what you say it’s going to do. The second is design – more than just helping someone complete a task or solve a problem, an app needs to do so better than anything else. It needs to support that user’s journey in a way that is also legitimately pleasurable to use.
The nexus between those two points – the part on the Venn diagram where design and function meet – has to do with user flows. If you truly want to create something meaningful that people are excited about using, you need to understand their specific goals. You can’t get to that point without first understanding both the “how” and the “why” of what they’re trying to do.
If You Want to Learn About User Flows, You Have to Think Like Your Users
Regardless of the app you’re designing, the end result should always be the same. Someone should be able to load up your app for the first time and, despite the fact that they’ve never seen it before, they still understand how all of the “pieces” fit together immediately.
At its core, “user flow” is the sequence of steps that users need to take to perform a task in the app you’re creating. If the user flow isn’t perfect, even the best design or user interface in the world isn’t going to be able to save you. If a task that should take five steps to complete takes ten, and it’s difficult to understand which order you’re supposed to do things in, people aren’t going to embrace your app.
To put it another way, without user flow, you don’t have nearly as much as you thought you did.
Again – an optimized user flow often results in a perfect balance of “form” and “functionality.” The actions that someone needs to take to use your app must be prioritized. If there’s a sequence they need to follow to complete a task, it needs to be visually easy to identify and easier to navigate. Each “next step” needs to be as clear and as concise as you can make it. It should be intuitive to your users. They shouldn’t have to “think” at all. They should just “do,” almost like it’s second nature.
You saw this a lot in the early days of mobile apps, particularly with Apple software. The company’s stopwatch app is easy to use because it looks and controls like an actual stopwatch. Their “Music” app was easy to use because it was essentially a digital version of their original iPod hardware that people were already familiar with. Everything was second nature by design, which is how the company got the reputation of being a provider of software that “just works.”
Is prioritizing user flows going to be easy? Probably not. But will it be worth it? Absolutely.
All of this is important because your users likely aren’t going to take the time to read any supporting documentation you offer. They don’t want to sit through a tutorial. They don’t have the patience to spend an hour with your app, trying to figure it out.
They want to pick it up and be able to use it. You need to support them in that quest, and to do that you need to support user flows above almost anything else.
To Drive Adoption, You Must First Drive Success
In the end, it’s important to remember that it isn’t enough to provide someone with a tool that performs a specific task or solves a particular challenge. That may have been true in the early days of the smartphone era, but in a time where there are hundreds of thousands of apps available in the iTunes and Google Play App Stores, you need to be willing to go a fair bit deeper than that.
By coming to an understanding of what someone is trying to do and how they’re trying to do it, you can in turn design something that supports and empowers them on that journey for the best results. At that point, you won’t have to worry about driving adoption – that’s something that will more or less take care of itself.
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