🍂🎃 Apptoberfest discussion: charts & diagramming apps

[Maggie Norby Adams]

Hi Community! It’s time for the third discussion in our Apptoberfestivities: charts and diagramming apps 📈

There are lots of apps on the Marketplace to help teams communicate visually in Jira and Confluence using flow charts, diagrams and other visual aids.

What we want to know is, what are your favorite apps for charts and diagramming and why? Which teams use your charts and diagramming app(s)? When does it make sense to use a chart or diagram in Jira or Confluence?

Let us know!

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[Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy]

I'm biased in terms of favorite apps (😉), but with regards to how my marketing teammates at Perforce use diagramming in Confluence, here are some interesting uses:

• Copywriters can make rough wireframes that show the structure and the flow of the page they're working on before getting our very busy designers involved
• For SEO purposes, we make mind maps/concept maps of our site content to show how pages and topics link together
• Diagrams help our product experts explain complex concepts to marketers so that we can write better white papers, design better infographics, etc. with less corrections and feedback along the way
• When working on email campaigns, creating a flow diagram that shows the timing of messages and branches of messages based on different engagement or audiences helps explain exactly what needs to be created and set up in our email platforms (also really helpful when you layer in performance data like click-through rates)
• For surveys, making a flow diagram of what questions should be skipped or added based on responses can help organize the survey logic before putting it into a tool like qualtrics
• When we make new videos, storyboarding the frames of each video with screenshots is an easy way to describe the action and graphic you're imagining alongside the script

Obviously, there are a lot of technical use cases for diagramming, too — but these are what I'm seeing most often day-to-day as part of a team that uses Gliffy!

[Maggie Norby Adams]

These are awesome examples, thanks @Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy ! As a fellow marketer I can see how all of these would be useful ways to visualize concepts. 

[John Funk]

Hey Maggie,

Thanks for the post! We don't use many of these but out of this list we use Gauge Gadget in tons of dashboards. It's very simple and bold and inexpensive.  :-)

[Fabian Lim]

For us is draw.io.

I can pretty much draw anything I need and the ui is easy to use.

[Paloma Fondon Araujo]

Hi @Maggie Norby Adams and hi all!!

In my daily work I always use Gliffy, it helps me a lot in taking requirements and it is always very easy for customers to understand the solutions to be adopted if the technical explanation is supported by a diagram, it's all very visual and simple!!!. I always use it in confluence, and when I deliver the documentation of a project there are always many gliffys in it!!! Also, I love that they are stored and can be shared because your gliffy can be used as a template for a colleague and vice-versa.

I also find very useful the app Rich Filters for Jira Dashboards, for customers it is very easy to incorporate these quick filters and have available the information they want to refine in a dashboard, the teams that find it really useful in my experience have been mostly project managers, although everyone indicates that it is very easy to use, visualize metrics and really useful!

Regards!

[Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy]

Totally agree — whenever I'm working with someone with a lot of technical expertise it's really helpful to have a visual aid. I could see how it would help you share with your customers. :)

[Girish_Shenoy]

Gliffy

I have been working with Gliffy for over a decade now!.

[Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy]

That's mind blowing! We should make medals for Gliffy decade-ers 🏅

[Suvradip Paul]

I think my vote would go for both draw.io and Gliffy for Confluence diagrams.

• For a long time Gliffy for sharing ideas and creating templates like UML, Business Process Models, Wireframes etc. So, I think and have seen this as one of the popular choices and recommended.
• Now recently draw.io, started using for the same purpose but along with that migration factor and ease of using on mobile devices (demonstrated by one of my peers).

Happy to hear and thoughts, feedback from others on the same. 

[Brant Schroeder]

I am a big Lucid Charts fan.