Design
What is a user flow?
A user flow is the sequence of steps a person moves through to complete a single task in a product, from entry point to finished outcome.
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Technical definition
A user flow is documented as a diagram of screens and decision points: each step, each branch where the person chooses, and each failure state where something goes wrong. It is scoped to one task, such as booking an appointment or completing a purchase.
A user journey is the wider version, covering a person's whole relationship with a business across sessions and channels. A user flow is the tactical slice inside it, which is why flows are what teams actually build and test against.
In plain terms
Write down every screen and every click between someone arriving and someone finishing. That list is the flow.
Seeing it written down is usually the moment somebody says out loud that the third step should not exist.
Why it matters
Flows expose the steps nobody defends. Map your booking process and you may find a visitor has to pick a service, create an account, confirm by email, log back in, and then pick a time. Each step was added for a reason. Together they cost you bookings, and until the sequence is written down, nobody sees the total.
The other thing a flow catches is the failure states. Most sites design the path where everything goes right and leave the wrong-card, no-availability, and already-registered cases to whatever the platform says by default. Those are the moments people abandon, so they are the ones worth designing on purpose.
