When creating diagrams, you need them to be picture-perfect, easy to understand, and precise for everyone to see. Therefore, you need to avoid various diagramming principles to achieve this and ensure you follow the latter. Attention to detail is critical in making flowcharts, and therefore there are a few things you need to be cautious of when making flowcharts.
- Ensure you use the appropriate/correct symbols
Each symbol has a distinct meaning. While it may appear more straightforward to use a process symbol for everything, the reader may become confused. When reading up on what each thing is all about, be sure to understand the right diagramming symbols.
- Avoid the use of excess color schemes.
The ultimate goal of a flow chart is to give a solution to a problem. With this objective, you must ensure that the intent doesn’t get lost with visual noise. Excess use of colors may be confusing to readers.
- Avoid inconsistent directions
Top to bottom and left to right are the two most common flow directions. However, these two sorts of directives should not get combined in the same flowchart. And consistency is quite important.
- Avoid inconsistent symbols.
When it comes to preventing visual chaos, maintaining a well-sized flowchart is critical. As a general guideline, make sure the height and width of the symbols in the flowchart are proportional to one another. That does not apply to connectors, for example, which get designed to be compact.
- Consider the spacing between the symbols.
We frequently choose to overlook this critical aspect. Maintain uniform spacing around symbols to make your flowchart look more professional. Decision symbols are the only exception to this rule, as they require more space to include branch names.
- Ensure you have a consistent branch direction
In an ideal world, a flowchart would be rational in every way. Branch direction is one of the regions where we don’t pay attention. Decision symbols are the best way to demonstrate this notion. TRUE circumstances should ideally emerge from the bottom, whereas FALSE conditions should emerge from the right.
- Ensure you scale
Scaling is another primary aspect that gets ignored. A comprehensive flowchart gets frequently resized to fit on only one page, and it’s never a good thing when this happens. It is preferable to have a flowchart that spans numerous pages rather than one crowded into a limited area with illegible details. If you don’t want your flowchart to take up several pages, consider creating a high-level flowchart that combines numerous process phases into one. To decrease the visual clutter of your flowchart, you may also bundle processes together and then collapse them.
- Extended flowchart
If your flowchart gets linked to another flowchart, it’s ideal for connecting it to the flowchart on a separate page using a circular node rather than placing it on the same page.
- Avoid inaccuracies
When creating flowcharts, keep in mind that double-checking the flowchart stages is essential to avoid any errors.
- Clearly define alternate paths.
Processes do tend to branch in particular flowcharts. It’s important to clarify whether you want to follow one branch or all of them for clarity’s sake.