Guidance: User Flows

[mnorthuis]

IA standards request

Define clear standards and guidance that teams must meet related to user flows

Goal: Document clear guidance and standards for user flows that teams need to meet. We currently have some documentation to establish best practices when creating/documenting user flows. We need to separate out the actual standards that teams must meet from the general documentation guidance.

Source(s) of information

• Best practices for documenting user flows
• Original experience standards

Acceptance criteria

• [ ] Placement within the VA design system is identified

• [ ] Standards are approved by OCTO IA lead, OCTO design lead(s)

• [ ] Clear standards related to user flows are documented and published to VADS

• [ ] Best practices for creating and documenting user flows is documented separately on GH

• [ ] New standards are communicated out to teams

• [ ]

[kristinoletmuskat]

Look back at experience standards to cross-reference which elements of this guidance are 'standards' and which are the guidance.

[kristinoletmuskat]

First draft of recommendation documented at google here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vNVjn0J6oMGy4fZ7peGrI4yPI5p9_TjP1vx73n1xqdk/edit#heading=h.80c5ydk3huxr

@erinrwhite and @mnorthuis this is ready for your review!

[kristinoletmuskat]

FYI I recommended consolidating the non-standards (defining acronyms and adding a key) in a short section called "other tips for user flows" at the bottom of the guidance. I think it would be beneficial for teams to have all user flow info in one place instead of dividing it between VADS and github, especially because the 'other tips' are just a few bullet points.

[mnorthuis]

@kristinoletmuskat I added the old experience standards that we need to cover towards the beginning of the doc. Those are what we need framed up. The focus should be on "You must do this" - standards that can be governed and potentially ticketed if they are not meeting them. I think there's still quite a bit of clean up on this yet.

The plain language section in the content styleguide or the URL standards could be used as a reference in how to potentially format this information. We should not use most of the example screenshots in the design system, we need the information to be clean and clear - its public facing documentation that all of VA will use, and may potentially feed back into the USWDS for broader use.

[kristinoletmuskat]

Thanks for taking a look! I will get to most of this in a few days, but question about the collab cycle standards: I noticed that the new collab cycle standards are very brief -- are we using the new ones vs the old ones? What happened to the old ones, and why did we change them?

But in general I get that we just want to use these from the old standards and flesh them out a bit. I can make those edits.