UX Glossary · F
Flowchart
Also: Process flow
A diagram of a process as steps and decisions, used to make branching logic reviewable.
A flowchart represents a process as boxes for steps and diamonds for decisions, connected by arrows. The notation is old, standardised by ANSI in the 1960s and later by ISO 5807.
What it is for in design work
Flowcharts are how branching gets made visible before it gets built. Screens show one path; a flowchart shows all of them, including the ones nobody wants to think about: what happens when the payment fails, when the session expires, when the user is halfway through and loses signal.
The value is not the diagram, it is the questions the diagram forces. Drawing an arrow out of a decision means naming both outcomes, and that is where teams discover they never decided what happens in the second case.
Flowchart, user flow, state diagram
Related but not the same. A user flow tracks a person’s path toward a goal. A flowchart shows process logic including system branches. A state diagram shows the states an object can be in and the transitions between them, which is the right tool when the question is “what can this thing be” rather than “what does the user do next”.
In practice
For anything with real logic, the flowchart is the specification. In automotive and industrial work it is often the deliverable a supplier builds from, because an ambiguous diagram becomes a wrong behaviour in a shipped product.