Questions for Flows

User inputs

These questions are about information that goes from the user to the product.

  • What information does the user input?

  • Is this input open ended or interactive?

    • Open ended examples: free-form text input, choosing an image to upload, recording a video.

    • Interactive examples: text input into a search form that displays results to pick from, choosing an address on a map, picking from a predefined collection of options.

  • Is there any input that would be considered invalid, and how does the app deal with it?

  • Are there any passive inputs? Most common example: user location via GPS.

  • What information does the product need from a new user? Is there a way for the user to change this later?

Information presented to the user

If the previous section was inputs, you can think of this one as outputs.

  • What information is shown to the user on this screen?

  • How is this information shown? Examples: text, images, maps, lists, graphs.

  • Does the information need to be sorted in some way? Examples: recency, distance from user, relevance.

  • Does the product send any active outward communications? Examples: emails, push notifications, SMS messages.

Interactions between the pieces

These questions are about how different pieces of the experience (users, the product, other services) interact with one another.

  • Do users interact with each other? Examples: messaging, adding as friend, “liking” or tagging of other users’ content.

  • Do the users interact with external services? Examples: payment services, shipping tracking, social login.

  • Does the product interact with external services? Examples: location lookup services, weather APIs, social networks (“Your friend X just joined! Check out their profile!”).

Business owner functionality

Questions about what you, the business owner, need from the product.

  • Do you need to receive alerts or summaries, via email or some other medium?

  • Do you need a specialized system for yourself or employees? Examples: driver app for your delivery staff, real-time order management interface for your kitchen staff.

  • Do you need an interface for manually approving users/content?

  • Do you need a content moderation system? A way for your admins to easily remove user content, disable user accounts.

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