How to build an interactive flowchart with Visio
by Rod Ward, Member Australia Chapter and QPI SIG
This article is based on a post by Rod on the Information Design and Architecture SIG list on June 12, 2006 and appears by Rod’s permission.
There are any number of tools that can be used to build an interactive visual document with links to more detailed information. To build a flowchart of this kind, Visio (2003) is effective and especially useful because it is standard on corporate software lists and therefore easy for others to edit and update.
Recently I used Visio’s Cross-functional Flowchart wizard to build multi-page swim lane diagrams of complex organisational processes, and then inserted hyperlinks on action shapes to link out to web page content residing on an intranet and in my client’s corporate SAP Knowledge Warehouse.
Each of these linked web pages either further explained the process flow or was a task-based topic that explained how to perform the actual process step as a software user task.
The processes in a system of this kind need to follow fairly rigid rules for all of this to work well and be easy for users to follow. Processes should always begin and end with well-defined events (not actions). A terminating event from one process phase can be the initiating event of a following phase. Processes are always made up of sequential steps and phases (like links in a chain) but they can also have many levels (like wheels within wheels).
If you are illustrating an involved process with many phases and levels, you can easily find that you need to create many diagram pages to cover all the places that the process can go (or branch to). I suggest starting with a very high-level simplified diagram of the entire process (perhaps as a pipeline) and make this the process Home page. Then for each phase in this simplified master diagram, create more detailed diagram pages that break the phase into subprocesses, followed by even more detailed diagrams (if necessary) for individual actions in the subprocesses diagrams. Keep breaking the process down until the actions are really user tasks, then stop.
Each diagram page in this single Visio file must be uniquely named. I generally use an abbreviation or acronym of the process name for this. Then, hyperlink the pages together by selecting the shapes in Visio and use Insert > Hyperlink. Visio’s hyperlink dialog allows selection of another page in the file as the target, or an external URL if necessary.
When you save all of this out to HTML, Visio effectively creates a ‘website’ of the process that users can navigate from end to end and drill down through layers to reach individual user tasks. It is usually these tasks that you want to link out to Quick Reference Guides or task-based topics in online help.
I have found this an excellent way to teach users how a complex process functions and also supply training materials or online help at the very spot in a process that the user may need to perform.
I generally do my process diagrams as landscape swim lanes when illustrating for end-user training materials, because users seem to understand this type of diagram more intuitively, but simple UML (Unified Modeing Language) activity diagrams can also come in handy, particularly if the process must be in a vertical orientation.
Once you have a Visio file like this for a given process, maintaining it is not difficult. When a section of the process changes, I just open the file in Visio, make the edit, output the file to HTML again and then upload the entire ‘process website’ to our intranet, writing over the previous version.
When you output these Visio diagrams to HTML they do not show up quite as well in other browsers as they do in IE. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t do a bad job of rendering the Visio output, even if it doesn’t give you all the nice navigation bells and whistles that IE does (like that oh so cool zoom feature). Firefox just gives you a set of links in the left navigation panel that allow you to move from page to page. Happily, the hyperlinks on actions and event shapes in the diagrams seem to work fine.
March 9th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Rod, in this article you mention using Visio to link to documents in an SAP KW system. I am doing the same at my company but experience some difficulties. When I create the hyperlink on a shape in my visio diagram, I am just using the big ugly url from KW that is rendered when viewing the documents. All is fine when previewing the visio diagram but KW seems to get into a hung state when I try to renavigate to another KW page after executing the visio hyperlink. Could you please give more detail on your implementation? That would be great. (At least which version of KW you were using?)