User flows

What I Do
Using Figma or Miro, create user maps for designers and other stakeholders that show the possible paths the users of an experience (such as an app or website) may take, given the users’ circumstances and needs.

Case study: Helping passengers rebook their flights
Helping users deal with flight delays and cancelations is the hardest part of designing any airline app — users are angry and confused, the amount of variables is high, and if you get it wrong, the entire app experience is diminished. As a senior content designer / strategist for AKQA working on an app for a major airline, I created user flow diagrams to show every situation a user could encounter when they experience a disruption (known as IROPs in the industry).

Challenges
All I had received from the client was a shortlist of external communication situations, but I needed to build a detailed back-end list of all possible entry points for users. To do this, I obtained the internal “IROP Bible” from the client plus a similar list AKQA had created for an old client, then used SME interviews to reconcile the information into one AirTable list specific to our client.

Outcome
After compiling a list of 38 IROP user stories in AirTable, I began tracing how I thought each of these users should move through the app, grouping users together by choice and outcome and referring designers back to the AirTable for variations. The result is one of those artifacts that looks clean and simple because of the many hours of work behind it.

Related work

To see samples, please contact me for the password.