User Task Flows Help Developers:

Alice Toth, Sunday, March 11, 2007 @ 7:51 pm

Work out the Workflow. Making changes after a product is released is much more costly, and sometimes not even feasible, than identifying issues up front and solving the problem before coding begins. Documenting the user task flows during the design phase allows team members to walk through the tasks as the user, identifying available actions and uncovering places where the sequence doesn’t match the user model. Decision points are identified and subtasks mapped out, giving the developer a visual of not only what the workflow needs to allow but how flexible it needs to be.

Model the Data. Creating task flows that diagram the end-to-end tasks throughout the system generates a picture of how the software will be used and how the user will interact with the data. Developers will begin to identify how and where the data is needed throughout the application. In turn, this will help them structure and organize the data in a manner that supports the users’ needs, rather than having the user modify their behavior in order to support a theoretical data model that doesn’t match their reality

Identify Patterns. Task flows gives the team a wall of visuals representing various tasks throughout an entire application. Scanning the flows allows them to quickly identify recurring patterns throughout an application. This, in turn, lets development begin to address creating reusable components or extending existing ones to allow the flexibility of reuse throughout the application

See the larger picture. Documentation binds large teams together. The end-to-end flow isn’t developed linearly by one developer or even by one team. Instead, it’s broken down into features with various teams coding the stories for that iteration. Creating end-to-end task flows is the perfect vehicle for letting a developer see the overall picture of how an entire feature works and, more importantly, how and where their piece fits into the whole. For developers it’s no longer one story in isolation, but rather a relationship of their one story with entry and exit points that define the sequence.

user experience design

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment