OmniGraffle: A Robust Diagramming Solution for Many User Types
June 22, 2019
OmniGraffle: A Robust Diagramming Solution for Many User Types
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle is my company’s tool of choice for creating workflow diagrams across teams and with non-design stakeholders. While the design team uses other tools, such as Balsamiq and Sketch, to do design-specific work, OmniGraffle is what we use to work with other teams, such as Strategy, Instructional Design, and Research. We also use it for mapping out content models, envisioning and designing frameworks, creating technical diagramming, and mapping out site maps. We use OmniGraffle to get on the same page before we get deep into our product design workflows.
- The ability to easily map out process flows for users of a wide range of tech comfort levels—The design is intuitive enough for even people with lower tech comfort levels to visually chart process flows. We have never had to do significant onboarding for less tech-savvy colleagues—this is a huge timesaver!
- Collaborative mind mapping—OmniGraffle is a great platform to get together with people and brainstorm ideas in the early stages of a project, then link ideas together to create visual relationships to inform business and product design decisions.
- Communicating strategy to stakeholders—Communicating the complexities of a workflow to stakeholders is a lot easier and more effective, with a diagram that clearly shows the relationships between factors rather than showing them a PowerPoint that, because of its slide-by-slide nature, makes it difficult to consistently show how different factors play into an overall workflow.
- There could be more scaffolding to support new users in getting to know how to best use all of the many features and tools it provides.
- There could be more support for printing. Many of our process flows extend beyond just one page, and OmniGraffle is rather finicky about printing multipage documents.
- We could use this tool more effectively if there was the ability to have real-time team collaboration. Document handoffs can be a point of missed communication, so it’d be great if we could ever have the option of working together in the same place at the same time.
- Creating incredibly clear visual workflows in OmniGraffle enables us to spend more stakeholder meeting time productively discussing the workflow and next steps, rather than explaining the step-by-step process. Because the visual shows the relationships between all factors and concepts, we can have a solid, straightforward document to discuss and reference as we make decisions and revisions. Time with bigger stakeholders is expensive, so this is a huge plus!
- Because OmniGraffle is so easy to use, we do not have to spend a lot of time and energy training new employees or existing colleagues on how to use it. We save time and money by having them get right to work, instead of spending days on training and practice.
- OmniGraffle is relatively inexpensive, which has allowed us to give access to the tool to many employees. Across multiple teams, I have heard leaders throughout the company comment positively on how much collective overall time has been saved by diagramming processes. For a company that used to diagram primarily through Microsoft Word docs, this has saved us significant time and from a lot of miscommunication that led to bad, costly decisions.
While these other tools are great for what they are, OmniGraffle’s solid focus on and support for diagramming makes it our tool of choice for communicating workflows and concept relationships, creating documentation, and creating other diagrams. Its libraries allow us to create designs quickly, and its ease of use enables us to use the tool widely across the company without much time or effort spent on onboarding.