methods for studying user flows

In professional practice as a UX designer, I often find myself confused as to what I was supposed to be designing. How is everyone else sitting down and knocking out work? How am I supposed to produce an experience best for the intended user so quickly? Wouldn’t I be filled with assumptions under such speed? These questions led me to develop new methods for studying user flows.

I will be the first to admit that these methods are not new at all. Perhaps they are overlooked in practice in certain instances. Practice is speed-oriented. The designer is often a feature-producing machine. To truly understand the user’s needs takes time, energy, and thoughtful analysis.

Rather than design a feature, I decided to fully unpack every option the user has along a journey to make a single decision. One single decision. What, as an experience designer, I so often think of as a flash judgment by a user, I can not fully understand without looking at all options placed before them.

Below is the experience displayed for three small user decisions. 1- I am a user, and I want to add visuals to a table (graph). 2- I am a user, and I want to add visuals to an axis graph (such as a bar chart). 3- I am a user, and I want to add a reference line to an axis graph. I find the decisions are not so simple after all. Even if the user begins to make them in a flash, I must first understand all options the interface presents before creating a new feature.