When you are confident with how to define flows, you will find that you can very quickly create placeholders for your flows and then start to sort them out into groups. You will naturally start by creating all the important flows that are driving the Users to interact with your planned app. This will prompt you to consider some of the other ‘supporting’ Flows that you will need to allow key experiences to work. Once you can confidently think at this higher level of abstraction Primary will become a very effective tool to visualise the scope of your project.
Group basics
There is nothing complex about Flow Groups, but they are magic. By grouping your Flows into functional areas, the little stories of the Flows join together into a wider narrative. It is this grouping that reveals the negative spaces where the things your user is going to want to do have not been addressed. Here is all you need to know about grouping Flows:
- Organise the Flows into a timeline in the Group. For the same reason we do everything in Primary, comprehension. If your Group is organised like the timeline of the movie Pulp Fiction, it is very hard to follow what is going on. Clearly in app, there are many asynchronous activities, and so the timeline can be a little arbitrary. There is usually an overall order that makes sense.
- Keep your Groups a manageable size. We recommend to aim around the 7-14 Flows per Group. You may have less if its a stand-alone functional area without many user goals that need to be satisfied, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Flows can be dragged between Groups, and within Groups to re-order them.
Flows By User
Primary provides an alternative view of your Flows arranged instead by User and then by Group. This is a pretty handy way to sort out who is doing what.
Note that moving a Flow that already has steps will not update the User nominated to carry out those steps. It is best to do this basic organisation prior to adding steps to your Flows.
Group by Status
Your flows can have their status set to one of four ‘out-of-the-box’ statuses.
- In Progress
- Needs Review
- On Hold
- Approved
Switching to the By Status view will re-organise your flows by status.