User flow, Onboarding and Organization
In my life, organization makes the world go round. Without it I’m not sure I’d be able to juggle as many things as I do. Charts, color coding, lists, etc. I love it all.
So how does organizing relate to UX? Well, I think it makes all the difference between a decent UX designer and a great one. A UX designers’ job is to enhance the user’s experience. What is the main way that we go about this? Research. What would this research be if it wasn’t organized? A full blown mess.
During our first semester learning about UX design, we did a ton of research. Background research, SWOT analysis, user research, user testing, the list goes on and on. In being able to go back and reference all of this research we did, I found that staying organized was key. This past week in class we focused on user flows and onboarding in regards to an app. My group decided to go with an app called My Singing Monsters because one of the group members remembered that there was a lot of onboarding in the beginning of the game to get you started.
We thought it would be a great opportunity to pin point different pros and cons of the onboarding experience. As we went through the app we discovered that, while it was a great example of the process of onboarding, being a game with rules and procedures it was also pretty complicated.
We soon found ourselves trying to organize all of the information we were collecting about learning the procedure of the game. Relying solely on post-its to organize our user flows, good and bad examples of UX and onboarding we quickly realized that we were micro organizing our information and as a result making our research confusing and complicated. We had over organized! Once we simplified our system of post-it sorting and organization, we came up with a great color coded system of keeping our different parts of the user flow and grouping the sections of the onboarding process in check.
On our first go, figuring out all of the information that took place during this user flow was a bit confusing and overwhelming. Once we got our system in order though, the process of recording the user flow, onboarding and good/bad ux took off and we were really able to understand the ux behind the creation of this game. All we needed was a little bit of organization.
