Diagramming Essentials

Explore Diagramming Best Practices

• Unlock the Power of Visual Communication
  • Diagrams are the right modality to get your point across in many situations, such as pitching a new process, advocating a specific software package
    • 83% of human comprehension occurs visually
    • Human brain can process images 6000x faster than words
    • Visual aids increase retention from 10% to 65%
  • Text-heavy emails, wordy slide decks, long messages from colleagues - not the best means of collaborating
• Build Quality Diagrams with Lucidchart
  • Lucidchart partnered with Salesforce to create this Trailhead
  • Like with any critical business communication, you must develop your visuals with intent and quality in mind:
    • Lucid calls out 3 C’s to guide you: Clarity, Consistency, and Contrast
    • If there are members of your team or stakeholders that need to adopt your vision, make sure your diagrams are designed in a way that is intuitive
• Convey Complex Ideas Clearly
  • Creating diagrams allows you to think visually, but at a certain point you need to clean it up and design it to be presentable
  • Goal should be to diagram it in a way others can understand without you being present to explain it
  • Try to evaluate each diagram from a new viewer’s perspective, considering these questions:
    • Is it specific to the audience?
    • Can the viewer easily understand the purpose?
    • Is it clear where the viewer should look first?
    • Do they know where to go from that starting point?
    • Can they read the text on the page?
    • Are the shapes, lines, colors understandable?
  • If you’re trying to communicate a highly complex idea, you may need to ask these questions several times and tweak your diagram over and over
• Achieve Consistency
  • Humans are constantly looking for patterns in communication and interpretation
  • Patterns are important because they offer visual clues to an underlying order
  • They allow us to quickly analyze a situation to understand how it works, enabling viewers to quickly assess issues and start asking the right questions

Symmetrical systems = balanced system

Radial systems start in the center and builds as it moves out

Upward spiral translates to grown, downward spiral points to devolving

Redundancy in a grid pattern makes it easy to manage and understand

• Use Contrast to Call Out an Element
  • Contrast conveys importance between elements and creates interest
  • Contrast can be achieved in many ways, but easiest are through shapes, colors, and text
  • Can involve adding shadows or adjusting the color and boldness of text to ensure your audience reads an important note
    
    
• Visual artifacts like diagrams help stakeholders understand messages faster than just text
• If you want to convey balance for the system you’re proposing, consider using symmetry in your diagram

Import a Salesforce Diagram Into Lucidchart

• Build Diagrams with Speed
  • Lucidchart offers free accounts
  • Blank diagram set up with LucidChart, shown below

• Explore Lucid’s 3 C’s in the Business Capability Map
  • It’s critical to communicate and collaborate quickly - this is enabled by the “Reference Architecture Gallery provided by Salesforce and Lucidchart
  • That page has a suite of templates that can be quickly imported and adjusted to your needs

• Consider the 3 C’s in the diagram:
  1. Clarity: Larger size of the title font indicates where the viewer should start
  2. Clarity: Shapes create a cascade effect that draws the eyes downward
  3. Consistency: Notice the clear set of symmetrical columns
  4. Contrast: Simple difference between the bold header and the regular body text indicates difference between higher level ideas and details
     
     
• Here’s how the business capability map shows up in LucidChart:

• Lucidchart and Salesforce provide prebuilt reference architecture so you don’t have to build diagrams from scratch
• To help a viewer read a diagram and differentiate between high-level ideas and details, adjust size and boldness and intentionally add shape patterns

Design a Business Capability Map

• Example of a customized Business Capability Chart shown below
• Adding product icons and other logos are paid features that cannot be updated when using a free version

• You do not need to delete a template text box in order to customize text in a Salesforce template diagram
• To adjust the position of a shape, you can simply drag it to the desired place