What are Task Flows?

Alice Toth, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 @ 9:38 pm

Task flows are a tool to help us think through the design before a feature is actually developed. They allow us to interject the user into the flow of the application and determine if the conceptual model agrees with the user model.

The Information Architect (IA) is generally the team member taking the lead on diagramming the user narrative. With the business requirements and user modeling taken into consideration, the IA determines the tasks needed for a specific feature and maps out how the user will accomplish the task within the application. The resulting diagram shows a series of actions the user must do in order to begin and end the task, which can be anything from uploading catalog data to generating reports to assigning rights and permissions to user accounts.

Starting with the initial flow, which is a high level concept flow for that feature, the necessary steps to initiate and complete the task are detailed and mapped out into the flow. From there, various iterations of the original diagram are created and expanded upon as more requirements become known. The end result maps out the different levels of complexity for that task once subtasks and parallel flows are identified and designed.

By placing the user into the process at this stage, the Information Architect and the team can determine up front whether or not the final task flows will meet the business requirements along with any system requirements and still make sense to the end user.

Updated: Attached is an example of a task flow. Click on the image to view it full size. For this particular project, we were displaying new functionality at the UI layer and the diagram was created to visually show all the different ways a user could arrive at this new feature. Not all flows are this complex.

user experience design

Comments: 6 so far

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1. 

   Do you have any examples of how you like create your task flows? What software do you prefer?

   Comment by Michael, Wednesday, March 7, 2007 @ 3:01 pm

2. 

   If I’m working on a PC, I use Visio to create task flows. If I’m on a Mac, I use OmniGraffle. Illustrator is also a good program. For me, most vector-based programs work well in creating task flows. I updated the post to show an example of a task flow. Hope this helps!

   Comment by Alice Toth, Wednesday, March 7, 2007 @ 4:53 pm

3. 

   The example of the task flow image in unreadable, so it does not served its purpose. I downloaded the file, increased its size and could not read it. Can you upload a legible version of the example, thanks.

   Comment by PM, Thursday, March 29, 2007 @ 11:56 am

4. 

   The diagram was provided to show a series of linear steps and their relationship; the actual words within the boxes isn’t the relevant part and, in fact, won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t involved in the project since the text is, in essence, shorthand for knowledge known by the team. The example posted is merely to show how a flow can look and that there may be multiple entry points which eventually integrate within the flow.

   Comment by Alice Toth, Thursday, March 29, 2007 @ 9:25 pm

5. 

   As a newbie to all this IA, it’s easy to confuse task flows with traditional flowcharts and sitemaps (they all have so many “boxes & arrows”). Does anyone know if really advanced IA’s do their site maps first, then- when a page needs a task flow, it links to the flowchart (i.e. flowchart for how a purchase works at this ecommerce site)??

   Comment by John McGowan, Tuesday, May 8, 2007 @ 3:37 pm

6. 

   A task flow comes from the user activity, i.e., what steps (or tasks) are needed in order to accomplish an activity (e.g., checkout). This is done in order to determine the necessary screens. In other words, a task flow may have 5 steps, but if all 5 steps can be accommodated on one screen, then only one screen will be designed incorporating all the data elements needed to accomplish the task. The task flow starts the process.

   Comment by Alice Toth, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 @ 6:45 pm

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