WWW… Wednesday! Pageflows

by Taylor Slattery | April 19, 2022

When it comes to the digital product space, success is directly related to ease of use. The less friction there is between the customer and the desired outcome, the greater likelihood of a conversion and the lower the cost per acquisition. To this end, large companies spend a great deal of both time and money testing and refining their user flows.

This is great news for the rest of us without similar resources to devote to the task of perfecting our user flows because we can simply just look to those who do for answers. Even products with an incredible value proposition won’t find success if they’re difficult to use. When a name manages to reach the level of ubiquity that companies like Uber and Spotify have, you can be certain they’re doing something right, and the best part is—they can’t hide their success. There’s no trade secret. The answers are right there for you to see. You can study them and apply their approach to your own projects.

This is where Pageflows comes in. Pageflows is a database of thousands of user flows from all the major companies and products you’ve heard of, and some you haven’t. With both screenshots and short videos, you can dissect the flows, designs, and micro-interactions of hundreds of different products. Flows can be filtered in a number of different ways depending on what you’re looking for. If you are designing for desktop, you can filter by format to exclude mobile user flows, and you can also further refine your search by type. Pageflows breaks each user flow into specific categories from onboarding or checking out, to planning a trip or building a playlist, so you can limit your selection for a more direct comparison.

You can also browse user flows by product, allowing for an easy overview of a brand as a whole. Seeing all of a brand’s user flows in one place is handy for studying systems to spot similarities and differences across the entirety of the platform between each of its various facets. This sort of aerial view of the system as a whole is incredibly convenient and would be impossible to achieve while using the app firsthand.

You can also browse user flows by product category which allows you to directly compare different products within the same space, like finance, fitness, and transport. Pageflows has a wide selection of categories, so no matter which niche you fall into, you can take a deep dive to see what works and spot any areas for improvement.

It’s important to note that all of the information found on page flows can be accessed on your own for free simply by walking through each user flow yourself. With that said, I think there is value to having a well-organized and easily searchable database at your fingertips. There’s something to be said for speed and convenience here, both of which can save you time and make the research process easier.