How to design a workflow

• No-Code, Drag & Drop
• Workflows can follow a schedule too
• Start with a plan

No-Code, Drag & Drop

With Gravity Flow you can implement complex workflows quickly without specific development tools or experience. Let’s review how Gravity Flow fits into your website and provide brief overview of some core terms you’ll be reading through the rest of the lessons. Gravity Flow runs using Gravity Forms and WordPress with a drag-and-drop setup. 

Gravity Forms provides an easy-to-use visual form editor accessible through your WordPress admin dashboard. It gives you a wide variety of field types that you can use to make anything from the simplest contact form to a robust multi-page online application. You can embed that form via a block or shortcode to any page of your website for anyone to submit.

Gravity Forms also allows you to define what should happen when site visitors/users submit that form, also commonly referred to as creating an entry. You can control what confirmation messages the user would see on screen to any email notifications that should be sent. While you as a site administrator could edit or export the entry data directly, from the users perspective their interactions with your website and form are complete.

Gravity Flow builds upon that strong foundation by letting you define a workflow that form submissions should follow. Just as the form has fields, a workflow has steps and Gravity Flow provides many step types to pick from plus flexibility to build your own.

Steps will generally fall into one of two categories:

Regardless of step type, the workflow engine (your website) will always keep track of where the entry is within its workflow as the various steps/assignee(s) complete their activity to move the entry towards completion. 

Workflows can follow a schedule too

In both automated and step types involving user interaction, you can define the schedule for when the step should start. This could include a delay of hours/days/weeks or be relative to a specific date including one provided in a form field. Steps that await user interaction can also have an expiration scheduled to ensure no one person or step becomes a bottleneck in your process.

There is so much to cover about what makes each step type unique or how you can use each step setting to achieve different goals that we can (and will) cover in a different course series. The key takeaway to focus on with this first lesson is the relationship between form and workflow to understand how you might structure your first of each with Gravity Flow. The type, amount and order of fields you put into the form will determine what information your users provide to you. Picking the right type, amount and order of steps to put into your workflow will determine how your users interact with the form entry.

Start with a plan

In the coming lessons of this Getting Started series, we will look at the user experience from form creation through workflow definition and the corresponding form submission to workflow completion. But, in order for that to happen, we need somewhere to start which is why the rest of this lesson is going to focus on our plan. Hypothetical demonstrations are all well and good, but we will ground this lesson series with a practical example. This will provide context to talk about why we might choose to set up certain step types/settings a particular way and can be something that we can improve/iterate on throughout this course and future ones as you learn to grow with the Flow 🙂

Let’s imagine we are a graphic design agency and we want to build a form/workflow related to offering a logo design service. What might our “today” business process look like without Gravity Flow or any structure/automation?

• A potential customer submits a design brief
• A series of back and forth emails. Everyone struggles to keep track of the latest version of attachments, forgotten attachments, one off feedback note gets missed within a long email chain, etc. A lot of time spent tracking the work instead of actually doing the work.
• The customer receives the logo and provides payment.

If you have never undertaken the process of creating a workflow from start to finish, it may feel like a complicated process. Our blog article on How to Get Started Building and Organizing Your New Workflow goes into good depth on this concept, but generally speaking you want to:

• Break it down into a series of one-off tasks in order to accomplish a goal.
• Note who would be performing each task?
• Identify what fields/data are needed to complete the task
• Identify what order the tasks need to be completed in

What could that same process look like if it were structured with Gravity Flow coordinating the workflow from concept to completion? 

Who?	Doing what?	How?
Potential Customer	Submit design brief	Submit Gravity Form
Manager	Reviews to ensure there is enough detail for the designer to work with.	Approval step
Manager	Assign to an appropriate resource that has cycles/skills for this design	User Input step
Specific Designer	Prepares concept(s) and sketch(es)	User Input step
Customer	Review the concept design	Approval step
Specific Designer	Complete the polished logo artwork	User Input step
Customer	Confirm the final design	Approval step
System	Send customer source artwork files	Notification step

This table/list doesn’t capture the potential need for multiple iterations of customer feedback or how the entry moves between multiple steps. For that, we would want to use a process map such as this swim lane diagram below. Nor does it include steps that elements like accepting payments so that our Logo Company can pay our sharp designers a salary. That is something which we could build out in full in a future course. For this series, the focus is on getting familiar with the basic fields and step types.