A complete guide to user flow analysis

User flows are crucial to any site or product. When done right, they guide the user along the path you want them to take, resulting in conversions or signups that drive key business outcomes. 

But when done poorly, these user flows can become ineffective—or worse, can actively cause users to leave.

User flow analysis gives you in-depth insights about which parts of your user flows are working and which parts need improvement. With comprehensive user behavior and product analytics insights, you can see exactly where to make user experience (UX) optimizations that delight customers and boost your bottom line.

Read on to learn more about user flows: what they are, how to create them, and how to elevate them with customer-centric UX improvements.

What is a user flow?

In basic terms, a user flow is a visual representation of how users move through your app or website. User flows help you

• Organize paths that take users toward a main goal, such as downloading software or signing up for a trial

• Build and optimize your product or website content

• Test and evaluate paths with real users before a critical implementation or launch

3 best practices to apply when creating user flows

You can sketch a user flow diagram in a variety of ways. But before committing to any specific method, it’s important to go through some basic guidelines.

First, figure out the business objective of the flow itself. This might be guiding users to make a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or opting in for a free trial of a service. Flows that fail to satisfy these objectives don’t offer value—to you or your end users.

Then, you need to account for deviations. There are often subcategories of users who will go through your flow even though they aren’t your target audience. Therefore, you need to make sure you have defined paths to address the journey for these outliers as well.

With those principles in mind, let’s jump into the best practices for creating user flows.

1. Keep your audience in mind

A critical aspect of user flows is understanding your ideal user. Designing a flow from the user perspective means taking into consideration your audience’s pain points, level of expertise, and preferences. Doing this effectively enables a product team to lay paths that are more likely to be trusted and followed.

For example, a user flow for a newsletter subscription may consist of a homepage, a page that outlines the benefits to signing up, and the newsletter signup flow itself. While it makes sense that some users would want to learn about the newsletter benefits, others may head directly to the signup flow. That’s why you need to collect data on user needs and motivations before mapping anything out.

2. Create a basic mockup before building a prototype

Designing a basic mockup of your user flow provides a rough understanding of the app or website pages included in the flow and how they connect to each other. This principle is based on the relatively straightforward concept that user flows should be treated like ongoing conversations.

Think of it this way: you’d need several hours to design the right prototype, and then you’d need to update it any time user flow requirements change, which happens often. With a mockup, you don’t have to revisit and make changes, and there’s enough time to iterate and arrive at a better outcome.

3. Refine and improve via prototyping

Refining a user flow is a continuous cycle of building, learning, and testing, and it’s easy to get lost in this complex journey. Fortunately, creating a prototype can help you validate the flow is designed according to your business objectives and end-user expectations. Prototypes depict how the path will work, and they’re usually driven by:

• Business goals and KPIs

• Entry and exit points

• Number of available paths

• Type of users and devices

Essentially, the user flow prototype serves as the foundation, making it easy for you to filter details for your interaction design, user interface (UI), and information architecture. 

Because user experience (UX) is the sum of multiple parts, identifying potential barriers, gaps, or pain points in user flows during the prototyping stage is key to delivering a smooth experience.

6 steps for conducting user flow analysis to improve UX

How do you make it easier for your users to move through the different steps of your flow? Here’s how to conduct a user flow analysis and leverage UX insights to positively impact your user experience.

1. Get a visual, high-level view of your user flow

The first step when examining a user flow is to get a high-level visualization of it. Display all the steps of the user flow in one clear illustration, mapping out the pages viewed during the customer journey.

This bird’s-eye perspective is key to understanding where visitors land, which tasks they complete (and at which stage), which in turn reveals their motivations and areas of friction. 

To get really granular, use customer segmentation to zoom in on specific audience segments, for even more in-depth insights.

2. Observe and simplify the number of steps

Now, list the number of steps in your user flow. This shows you how complicated it is for visitors to complete an action—in other words, how much effort it requires.

Identify friction points in the customer decision journey, including looping behavior (where they return to the same pages) and premature exits. Look for ways to reduce effort to address these issues: for example, can you remove the number of fields in a form to reduce how much information users have to input?

⭐ Pro tip: use session replays to see exactly what users do on your site or product. Watch how they navigate your user flow from beginning to end to discover which elements capture their attention and which cause frustration. Instantly find moments of friction, like rage clicks, and discover opportunities to fix poor UX to create more enjoyable (and higher-converting) experiences.

Session Replay in Contentsquare lets you see how users progress through your user flow and uncover ways to improve it

3. Perform a page-by-page analysis

Next, dig into each specific page in your user flow to understand user behavior on each one. You’ll want to pay particular attention to any issues you spot, like error messages, UX obstacles, and pages with high frustration scores.

To analyze user behavior, use tools like:

• Heatmaps to get an aggregated view of how users interact with each element and discover which ones capture their attention and which ones cause them to bounce

• Session Replay to watch how users navigate key pages (like your checkout page) and see what causes them to get frustrated or drop off

• Voice-of-Customer (VoC) tools like surveys and feedback to get qualitative insights directly from your users and validate your assumptions

Once you have concrete data about which pages or parts of your user flow are causing issues, you can make data-driven decisions about how to fix them.

Use heatmaps in Contentsquare as part of your user flow analysis to see which elements people engage with—and ignore

4. Set clear metrics

When optimizing your user flows, your primary goal is probably to improve conversions—but there are other metrics you can use, too. You might want to reduce rage clicks, increase user engagement (measured with click recurrence, scroll depth, or time on page), or reduce hesitation time.

When you focus on a few KPIs or metrics, you can prioritize your user flow optimization efforts around the goals that matter to your business—and start to see real, measurable results.

5. Test different options with A/B tests

Use A/B testing to experiment with user flow optimizations and find the one that works best.

A/B testing is a research method that runs 2 versions of a website or app to determine which one performs better. Use A/B testing to trial different copy or marketing messaging, layouts, designs (including button shapes or colors), or even add or remove steps from your user flow. Just remember not to change everything all at once or you won’t be able to attribute the results to one specific thing.

Once you have your winning variation, dive into session replays and heatmaps to see why it won. This will allow you to make informed optimization decisions and extend your learnings to other projects.

👩🏽‍🔬 See it in action: see how ASICS used Contentsquare to enrich its A/B testing.

Analysis in Contentsquare was easy to set up and we started collecting the data straight away. Moreover, we didn't need to do anything before launching the experiment, which also meant we didn't need to delay the test while preparing the tracking setup for it.

Andrey Prokhorov

Digital Experience Optimization Manager

6. Monitor your user flows for continuous improvement

Once you’ve completed your UX analysis and made these data-driven changes to your user flows, continue to monitor them to assess the impact of your optimizations. User needs and behaviors can change over time, so you need to stay close to your users to ensure you continue to meet their needs—and your business goals.

Draw on user behavior insights to optimize your user flows

With UX analysis, you can zoom in on what makes your user flows effective—or not so effective—and make optimizations based on real user data and preferences. 

These improvements have a direct impact on your business: from increasing conversion rates to enhancing customer satisfaction, seamless user flows are a simple but powerful way to engage your users and drive long-term growth.

FAQs about user flow analysis