draw.io Diagrams Make Onboarding Easier

This guest blog was written by Kymberly Fergusson, a content specialist for draw.io at //SEIBERT/MEDIA. She is passionate about helping people communicate and learn more effectively, which is why she loves diagramming with draw.io. She is convinced that once you get started with draw.io, you’ll love it just as much!

Onboarding is both extremely important and really tricky to get right. You want to get new hires up to speed with projects, tools, systems and processes as quickly as possible. Yet you want to avoid overwhelming them and confusing them with too much information.

Diagrams make the onboarding process much lighter and ensure your new colleague can more accurately and easily recall what they learn.

Why diagrams are so important

Our brains are designed to process information visually. The increasing popularity of images and video on the internet over the past decade is rapidly improving our visual IQ. It is easier for us to quickly pick out patterns and important information from an image than a slab of text.

Onboarding in a central place

Even though each team has its own processes and tools, it makes sense to keep the onboarding process and information in one central location. Confluence is ideal for this – all important procedures and information is stored in your company intranet.

Having written content is all well and good, but people remember information more easily when it is presented in picture form. Workflows, organization charts, floor plans, tree diagrams to show dependencies in projects, network architectures, code documentation, etc. All of these are both easier to understand and easier to create in diagrams than explaining them with just words.

Many find brainstorming and planning in diagrams very useful for clarifying their thoughts. And infographics make content more memorable.

Diagrams in Confluence with draw.io

We’ve established why diagrams are so important. That means you should be convinced that everyone – all teams and departments – should have access to a diagramming tool. Instead of just an elite few with access to an expensive stand-alone diagramming tool, everyone in your intranet can use the same powerful features in the draw.io for Confluence app.

The huge number of templates and shape libraries mean that all teams will find the app a useful addition to their toolset. And, new hires will be able to pick up their team’s knowledge faster.

• Programmers can see UML diagrams to explore your code base.
• Sales consultants will learn about the company’s sales processes in BPMN diagrams.
• IT staff will be able to refer to the IT infrastructure in architecture diagrams.
• Managers and marketing staff can create infographics for publications and presentations.
• Everyone can learn about important safety or data security processes in flowcharts and how the company is structured in organization charts.
• App and website developers can quickly mockup interfaces.
• …

There are so many use cases where draw.io for Confluence can help you convey information clearly to get new hires up and running quickly.  You can even use draw.io diagrams to provide attractive page navigation elements!

Want to make diagramming with draw.io in Confluence even faster?

Have a look at how administrators can customize the draw.io interface so that your staff can create diagrams quickly using your corporate styles, custom templates and shape libraries, and favorite draw.io plugins.

Importing and exporting diagram files of various formats is as easy as drag-and-drop. And if you have many Gliffy diagrams in your Confluence instance, you’ll love the single click mass-Gliffy importer that will make migrating to draw.io a breeze!

Well organized onboarding

By organizing everything that new users need to know into courses with a learning management app, such as StilSoft’s izi LMS app for Confluence, you can guide them step-by-step through what they need to learn in a structured and logical way.

You can test their understanding and knowledge with quizzes, something that is especially important when you need to demonstrate all staff understands a process for audits (for example, for a data security accreditation).

Courses and quizzes can include draw.io diagrams

Instead of using hard-to-edit images in your courses and quizzes, use draw.io diagrams. If you pair this with the excerpt and excerpt-include macros, you can have a master diagram in one location, and reuse it throughout Confluence and your onboarding courses and quizzes. When it becomes out-of-date, you only need to update the master draw.io diagram, and it will be automatically updated everywhere it is used.

Convinced? Start diagramming with draw.io today!

draw.io is available on the Atlassian Marketplace for both Confluence and Jira and you can try it for free today. You can learn more about diagram use cases, access tutorials and white papers at about.draw.io.

As an Atlassian Platinum Vendor and an experienced app developer, StiltSoft can help you with all of your draw.io diagramming and onboarding needs.