A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words.
We often think of interaction/product/UI/UX design in terms of screens and templates, but an essential part of system design is how the user and the system interact with each other. The most elegant way to document these interactions are user flows.
User flows can be different formats - sometimes the situation requires screen based flows, sometimes the user flows have lots of decision points and need something closer to a decision tree.
Role: various: UI Design, Design Management
The Trip, a temporary sweepstakes mini site.
The Trip was a feature level sweepstakes than ran once a year on Travel Channel. Unlike the monthly sweepstakes, The Trip had an on air show linked to it. We engaged an outside vendor to manage the sweeps entry component, and built supporting show, prize, rule pages, along with a daily newsletter. User pathing had three variations to it: first time entries, subsequent entries, and an attempt at a duplicate day entry. The split user flow/sitemap diagram was used to communicate expectation and flow across three teams involved in the project: the external vendor, the internal sweepstakes team, and the Travel Channel team.
SafeSearch
SafeSearch was a feature of AOL Web Search that gave the user control over whether or not adult content returned in web search results. The feature could be set to off, moderate, or strict, and we displayed different advertising content on the page during SafeSearch moderate/off searches. SL here stands for sponsored link, SERP is search engine results page, and NRF is no results found. It was easiest to communicate the various results and advertising settings using a decision tree like layout.
Ex AOL Mail Flow
An example of a screen based flow, this flow documented a fairly new process for AOL at the time: free AIM-based email. Two versions of the flow are illustrated, the first when the user is already signed into AIM and so is automatically signed into a new email address. The second flow shows a non-authenticated user who clicks on mail and is given the opportunity to register for the new AIM based email.