Lucidchart is a focused on helping you quickly create organizational charts and complex workflows that you can share with others.
March 08, 2019
Lucidchart is a focused on helping you quickly create organizational charts and complex workflows that you can share with others.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Lucidchart
Lucidchart is being used across the organization. Some users are creating data models. Our marketing department uses it to flow new sitemap ideas. My department, UX, uses it for complex process flow illustration and sitemap creation. Our work products from Lucidchart are always used to communicate with colleagues across departments and during ideation sessions when working through complex user tasks for our software products.
- Lucidchart makes it extremely easy to quickly draw out a sitemap using the sitemap shapes. You can drop one shape on the canvas, open its details, and type your entire site outline in and Lucidchart creates a beautiful sitemap.
- Shapes for decisions in some of the provided templates are too small to contain the amount of text I often need when I'm creating a process flow diagram. Lucidchart allows me to make a custom shape that fits my needs and makes it reusable across projects as a new shape template.
- Drawing a diagram is very easy when you're working within a shape template. Lucidchart allows you to drag a connection from any point on a shape and gives you the ability to pick the next shape in the context of what you're doing without going back to the shapes palette to pick it. This saves a lot of time!
- I've found layers very useful when illustrating a sitemap with users who have different access permissions to a website. I create a master sitemap layer and put each unique user on their own layer with a different colored shape overlaying each element of the master sitemap they have access to. By turning layers on/off, I can quickly show which areas of a site individual user types have access to.
- I love the ability to work with the sitemap shapes, drop a shape and type in my entire site to let Lucidchart automatically create the visual map. The downfall is trying to make edits using the same text editor later. You can add new shapes and move existing ones around with ease in your map, but I'd love the ability to click a shape and open the editor with the shape I selected highlighted so I can begin editing there. Instead, the editor opens and you have to scroll around looking for the page you want. The editing window is also small, so this task is almost impossible to do.
- I sometimes have problems with the alignment of my shapes on the canvas when I'm trying to use a grid. Lucidchart seems to snap off my gridlines sometimes. And if the canvas changes, my grid spacing changes, causing my shapes to be off the grid I've defined.
- Shapes on a canvas display a red dot for locations you can click to pull out a connector and add a new shape. I notice when I'm on the middle of a shape line that a 2nd hollow dot appears to the side of the shape which allows me to also drag from it to create a new connector. I'd prefer having the solid dots on the actual shape to avoid the confusion about where you're clicking if you're working in a congested map.
- I can't comment on ROI as that's not really measurable in my environment and usage of Lucidchart, but I can say it's greatly increased my speed in creating documents like this for use with colleagues over whiteboarding, pen & paper, and other illustration applications.
Lucidchart is designed to do one thing in my opinion, design charts of connected shapes. Other apps can do the same but are often tied to a desktop app and bloated with other illustration features I do not need. I like that is Lucidchart is limited in features to those specific to the needs of this task and allows for easy sharing of my documents with others.