Design & UX · master area
Current-State Flow Mapping
Drawing what exists before designing what should. The before-picture every redesign needs — and the artefact that turns a redesign argument into a conversation.
Owners: Designer, PO Phase it lives in: What We Build (Volume III) The corpus principle this enacts: Witnessed, not described.
Where it lives in the chain
- What We Build · Design Shaping — current state first — the canon
- Before We Build · Journey Mapping — the upstream artefact this draws from
How to do this
- Principle — Witnessed, not described
- Related practice — Holding amigos — the current state map is read aloud in the amigos session
- Clinic — A brief that didn't witness
What a session looks like
Sixty to ninety minutes. The designer draws the current flow before any redesign — every screen the named person actually touches today, in order, with the workarounds annotated as workarounds. Not the screens the team thinks the person uses. The screens the observation note recorded. The map is hand-drawn first, refined in Figma after. A redesign that begins from the new flow without the old one beside it is a redesign without an argument.
Related crafts
- Journey Mapping — the upstream observation artefact
- User Flow Design — the after-picture
- Wireframing & Prototyping — the next step once the flow is settled