Last updated on 2024年8月8日

How do you use diagrams, charts, and visuals to enhance your design documentation?

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Design documentation is a crucial part of any technical solution project. It helps you communicate your ideas, requirements, assumptions, and decisions to various stakeholders, such as clients, developers, testers, and managers. However, writing effective design documentation is not just about using words. You also need to use diagrams, charts, and visuals to enhance your design documentation and make it more clear, concise, and engaging. In this article, we will show you how to use different types of diagrams, charts, and visuals to improve your design documentation and why they are important.

本文章的要点总结

Interactive mock-ups:

Create prototypes using tools that mimic user workflows. These allow clients to engage with the design, revealing gaps and refining requirements before development begins.
Adopt a design tool:

Implement a shared platform for creating and viewing design documentation. This ensures everyone stays aligned and can collaborate effectively, regardless of location.

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1 The benefits of diagrams, charts, and visuals

Diagrams, charts, and visuals can be used to present complex information in an easy-to-understand way. For example, they can be used to illustrate the structure and flow of solution components, demonstrate the functionality and interactions of features, and highlight the key aspects of design. Additionally, visuals can capture the attention of your audience and encourage feedback.

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Mark Weaver

Solutions Architect
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In my expectance visual aids are better for both understanding but also for buy in of solutions form clients and stakeholders. Visual aids can tell so much more than reading a 10 page detailed design of the same solution.

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Roland Bühler

Product Owner ? Project Manager ? Requirements Engineer ? Consultant
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Diagrams and visualizations enhance software design documentation by simplifying complex concepts, improving communication, and ensuring consistency. They help identify design issues early, support collaboration, and provide clear traceability from requirements to implementation. Common diagrams include architectural diagrams, flowcharts, ERDs, UML diagrams, sequence diagrams, state diagrams, and Gantt charts. These tools make documentation more efficient, aiding in better planning, management, and stakeholder understanding throughout the development lifecycle.

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2 The types of diagrams, charts, and visuals

When creating design documentation, there are many types of diagrams, charts, and visuals that can be used to enhance your design. For example, Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams can be used to model software systems and include class diagrams, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, and state diagrams. Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams are often used to model the data and relationships of a database system. Flowcharts are used to show the logic and sequence of a process or algorithm, while wireframes represent the elements, navigation, and content of a user interface (UI) or web page. Mockups are used to demonstrate the appearance and style of a UI or web page. Lastly, infographics can be used to show data and statistics of a topic or problem.

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Léa Hill

Product & People Development (CSM, CSPO, CXS, CAL-I, Dare to Lead trained) | Maker in the making
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Static wireframes are fine, however, interactive mock-ups best for vetting your functional designs. At some point your career you will discover people don't always know what they want until you put the completed functionality in front of them — then it's too late. Providing detailed interactive designs for clients/end users to imitate their workflows with can highlight design misses and surface unknown needs. Create the illusion of interactivity with Power Point or Balsamiq or invest in InVision, Figma or AdobeXD for high-end prototyping. Interactive mock-ups or design prototypes are also useful to development teams. Our goal is not only to delight end users but also to streamline development and reduce or eliminate expensive rework.

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3 The best practices of diagrams, charts, and visuals

To use diagrams, charts, and visuals effectively in your design documentation, best practices should be followed. This includes choosing the right type of diagram, chart, or visual for your purpose and audience; using consistent and clear notation, symbols, colors, and labels; utilizing appropriate tools and software to create and edit; adding captions, titles, legends, and descriptions to explain; and referencing and citing sources. For example, UML diagrams are suitable for software design, ER diagrams for database design, flowcharts for process design, wireframes for UI design, mockups for UI presentation, infographics for data presentation; UML notation should be used for UML diagrams, ER notation for ER diagrams, flowchart symbols for flowcharts, UI elements for wireframes and mockups, graph types for infographics; UML tools should be used for UML diagrams, ER tools for ER diagrams, flowchart tools for flowcharts, wireframe tools for wireframes, mockup tools for mockups, infographic tools for infographics; captions should describe the purpose and scope of the diagram/chart/visual; titles should name the diagram/chart/visual; legends should define the notation/symbols/colors/labels of the diagram/chart/visual; descriptions should provide additional details and context; references should link the diagram/chart/visual to the corresponding text or section in the document; citations should credit the original author or creator.

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Seon Shakespeare

Solutions Architect @ WPP | Atlassian Community Leader | Transforming Workflows, Empowering Teams
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A visual without context is like a map without labels. In Confluence, we embed diagrams directly into relevant project pages and can link them to specific Jira tickets. This way, viewers have all the background information they need to understand the visual's purpose and importance.

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4 The challenges of diagrams, charts, and visuals

Using diagrams, charts, and visuals in design documentation can come with certain challenges. Creating and updating them can be time-consuming and tedious, and if not done properly, they can be ambiguous and misleading. It is also important to balance the quantity and quality of these visuals to avoid overwhelming or distracting your audience. Investing time and effort in designing, drawing, formatting, and revising these visuals is essential in order to keep them in sync with your text and code changes, as well as avoiding errors, inconsistencies, and confusion. Ultimately, the goal should be to ensure that the visuals complement and support your text and code content and message.

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Abe Diaz

Principal Technical Product Manager - Disaster Relief by Amazon
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In the past whiteboards were a great way to get design diagrams started and communicating; in a hybrid world adapting a company wide tool for designs is key for inclusion and effectiveness.

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5 The examples of diagrams, charts, and visuals

Illustrating the potential of diagrams, charts, and visuals to bolster design documentation, here are three scenarios with examples of how they can be used. For example, when designing a software system for an e-commerce platform, a class diagram can reveal the classes and relationships of the system, a sequence diagram can show its component interactions, a wireframe can display the order page layout, a mockup can display its appearance, and an infographic can depict order volume and revenue statistics. When creating a database system for a CRM platform, an ER diagram can show the entities and relationships of the data model, a flowchart can illustrate the data validation process logic, a wireframe can present the customer form structure, a mockup can demonstrate its style, and an infographic can provide customer segment and retention data and trends. Then for automating invoice generation on an accounting platform, a flowchart can describe the steps and decisions of the invoice generation process, a UML activity diagram can explain its actions and transitions, a wireframe can illustrate the elements of the invoice template, a mockup can demonstrate its look, and an infographic can present invoice frequency and amount data and statistics.

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6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Ruperto Arrieta Jr.

Solution planning and design for Enterprise and IoT
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Seeing how visualization hastens understanding of a specifically visualized data set, we consider new tools that are being introduced to "bridge-the-gap", if you will, between what e.g. users may need and what UX/UI team could propose. An interesting example is SceneBuilder that is a WYSIWYG interface (drag-and-drop) builder that works with JavaFX. This is good news for advanced users who could use simple editing skills to create a GUI and then ask build team to implement the needed logic. So in realm of MVC, the "Controller" will be provided by build team while the user w/ assistance from UX/UI could provide the "View". This seems a significant saving in time and dev cost.

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How do you use diagrams, charts, and visuals to enhance your design documentation?

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1 The benefits of diagrams, charts, and visuals

2 The types of diagrams, charts, and visuals

3 The best practices of diagrams, charts, and visuals

4 The challenges of diagrams, charts, and visuals

5 The examples of diagrams, charts, and visuals

6 Here’s what else to consider

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