Do you know the difference between a flow and a treatment?
I’ll pause while you Google/Bing it.
Okay.
Now that you’ve learned more than you ever wanted to know about wastewater management, let me provide some context.
The context is User Experience (Ux) Design and the terms have specific definitions. A “flow” is a kind of Use Case, only different. Have you ever been doing something where you experienced a suspension of time due to complete absorption in an activity? That’s a flow.
I find programming to be a flow experience, nothing causes the hours of a day to melt by faster than when I’m writing code. I sometimes think it is lunchtime and everyone has already gone home for the day, it’s incredible.
For obvious reasons Ux Designers have latched on to this concept of “flow”, the objective is to create flows from what otherwise would be Use Cases. This step in the Design process is where amateur Designers do the most damage. I’ve witnessed people trying to implement good well-thought out Use Cases 1:1 in a User Experience and the result is awful. It’s what Jody Turner calls a “depleting experience”, meaning the product experience leaves the user feeling completely depleted of energy and life afterward.
Thankfully, flows are not impossibly hard to envision and they can occur naturally and accidently. You don’t need to wear your black turtleneck and beret, but you do need to be open-minded and ready to challenge the status quo. The world’s top Designers don’t wait around for a flow to randomly happen, they understand that a big part of being a Designer is to conceive and implement flows. It turns out that flowing (i.e. the act of creating flows) requires more than luck – there’s training, talent, and hard work involved. Any Designer can luck into a flow, but the best Designers can create them on demand, there’s nothing random about the process.
Flows are probably the #1 non-functional quality customers think of when asked whether they like a software product. Great products require great flows. Conversely, your product can have all the features in the world but if you don’t have flows, people will never be fully satisfied with your product.
So, given that - any idea what a treatment is?
A treatment usually refers to the graphics, as-in the “graphical treatment”. For example, a hyperlink is usually rendered with a distinct blue color and an underline. That is a treatment. Treatments are visual and behavioral cues and they are essential aspects of usability. Treatments do everything from induce eye fixations to convey what will happen next. Some treatments are intended to draw contrast and distinction to data, others are meant to convey silent assistance so users know what to do next.
Designers try to come up with visual treatments that users don’t consciously notice but still instinctively comprehend. For example, how do you convey to someone that a UI element, like a button, is clickable? How about touchable, or dragable, or … you get the idea.
Some treatments are very challenging to design. For example, if you want to convey whether clicking an element will trigger a new pageload vs. a modal popup, what treatment accomplishes that? You won’t find the answer in a Microsoft Expression toolbox.
While Ux Designers have always nerdfested treatments, they are actually really important to the Product Design process because the right treatment can make the difference between a completely puzzling (and therefore depleting) product and a good product.
Treatments and flows have a synergistic existence. Sometimes a Use Case only becomes a flow if the Designer injects the right treatments. If a Designer envisions a particular flow she will often specifically engineer treatments to bring the flow to life.
Final analysis – are treatments and flows strictly Ux world or are they part of Product Design/Software Design as a whole? I think the latter. That’s why I mentioned them.