Livia Labate and I have been trying out new ways to help communicate issues we observe with flows. Here’s a high-level example.
Use this tool to document the experiences you observe directly from users or from other metrics. This can reflect the experience of an individual user or a composite of similar user behaviors. The diagram can help communicate troublesome areas of a particular process in the user experience.
The idea is…
The more unexpected activities we add to a process the more room there is for complication.
The more a user slides the more likely they may fall and not achieve their goal.
To address this…
We must remember to better manage expectations and assist users in completing required tasks so they don’t fall.
That’s pretty awesome!
How has it been working?
It’s been working really well. It shows just how far a user gets away from the process they set out to perform and how hard it can be to climb back up to where they need to be. It’s been effective at generating an action-oriented response from stakeholders.
I’ve mostly used it to convey composite behaviors among participants with more complex processes than the simplified version shown here. I’m working on demonstrating the more complex case.
Very cool work…
So glad you wrote this up!
I was telling Crystal yesterday or the day before that I used it in the project I am currently working on to highlight some risks areas people were not convinced where very problematic. I just sketched one of these quickly on a whitboard to show that a user’s journey between their starting point and intended destination actually forced them to take actions that were 5 steps removed for where they started. It was a great way to visualize the problem and while we still find ourselves in a situation where we have those 5 levels away from core tasks, we were able to create much better mitigation strategies.