How to Add More Info to Diagrams (Without Creating an Unreadable Monster 😉)

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This is a sneak peek of topics covered in Gliffy’s next webinar, Dynamic Diagramming: How to Take Your Confluence Pages to the Next Level. Join us on April 16th! You can sign up here. You don’t have to be a Gliffy user to find these tips helpful!

Our Director of Engineering, Mike Sample, was walking me through his webinar concept and I happened to “borrow” a few of his tips for a school project. I’ll give you a quick step-by-step, but first, a question:

Have you heard of Pop-Up Notes?

I hadn’t. ( 😅) They flew under my radar for way too long! If you’re already using them, you are absolutely one of the best diagrammers out there. MIke’s going to cover some new ways to add interactivity to diagrams, but for now we’re sticking with my Pop-Up Notes discovery.

How to Use Pop-Up Notes

In a nutshell, these give you the ability to display more information when a user hovers over one of the shapes in your diagram. Uses for this are endless, really... You could add more details about people in your org charts so that it’s visually very clean, but allows a viewer to get more details about whoever they mouse over. You can add details to tricky steps in your flowchart. You can define a word that might not be immediately understood by every viewer.

For my Industry Analysis course, my team and I did a survey of over 200 undergrads at our university. This survey had over 20 questions where students rated the extent to which they “agreed” about certain statements about fashion brands. Our results captured the perception of brands as “affordable,” “trustworthy,” and “stylish.”

Here’s what our tri-venn diagram looked like as I was building it and step-by-step of how I improved it:

Step 1: Click “Add Pop-Up Note” in the toolbar.

It’s right between the eyedropper and the link icons. Then, just click on the shape you want to add your rollover text to.

Step 2: Add Your Text

My group needed to be able to easily demonstrate what all those attributes actually mean. We’re adding the questions that we used from our survey so that people can see how we were defining style, trustworthiness, and affordability. 

Step 3: Check Your Notes

Publish your diagram and mouse over each object to make sure your notes show up correctly. If you're in Gliffy, this feature will work in both the diagram viewer and the macro on your Confluence page. Cool, right?

Step 4: Tidy It Up!

The one thing that irked me about my Venn Diagram at this step was that the icons indicating an available pop-up note were overlapping with other elements. Good news: there’s an easy fix. I rotated each circle so that note icon would land on the outside of the diagram. And, ta-da!

As I mentioned, this is one way to think about making your diagrams more interactive and dynamic. Prior to organizing this webinar with Mike, I was thinking of them as entirely static. We know visuals are a great way to communicate, but thinking of them this way has “unlocked” a lot of new ideas for me! 

I hope you have time to join us on April 16. Regardless of whether you’ve used Gliffy for years or you’re new to diagramming altogether, thinking about design in this way is a valuable lesson. Sign up here and I’ll see you there. 😉