Are you having a hard time crafting the perfect flow of your website? Not sure if your click-throughs are being led to the right place? It can be hard to visualize the user experience of your website without help.
Enter: a website flowchart. Good flowchart design can help you create a tailored user experience for your website readers that leads them right where you want them to go. There are certain flow chart rules that you need to follow while you’re designing your site that’ll help.
Keep reading to learn the best way to make a flowchart so you can improve your website’s flow in a hurry!
Stay Consistent
Do yourself a favor and decide upon your flowchart’s design elements ahead of time. If you’re going to use arrows, stick to arrows through the entire process. If you prefer simple lines to connect your flowchart together, that’s fine too.
Regardless of which design elements you prefer, make sure to keep it consistent. If you don’t, you’re only going to create confusion for yourself down the line.
This also goes for your color choices. Don’t worry so much about the aesthetics of your flowchart; after all, you’re the only one who’s going to see it. Instead, come up with a color key that makes sense with your website’s plan. For instance, you could make pages without actionable items yellow, and pages with options green.
Keep It Simple
Nothing is more confusing than a messy flowchart with a thousand shapes and lines on it. You might think this is unavoidable for large projects, but that’s not the case. You might even be a super thorough person who wants to break down every single step of a smaller process.
Don’t worry. You can.
If your flowchart needs to encompass a whole slew of processes that can’t be left out, simply create a hyperlink to another flowchart. Instead of hosting every subprocess on your master chart, creating smaller ones on different pages will clean it up a little.
For example, say you host a mini quiz on your website. Depending on the user’s quiz results, they’ll be directed to a different sales page of your website, each offering a service or product that’s tailored to that quiz result.
Instead of including all of that on your main flowchart, create a separate one that outlines where each quiz result will lead. On your main chart, simply insert a link to your quiz results flowchart within the quiz page square.
Orient Properly
What’s your strategy for your website’s flow chart?
Are you trying to create a funnel in which you lead potential customers through your site, eventually landing them on your sales page? Or are you trying to tell a story, taking them from point A to point B, in an effort to inform them about your brand or business?
Orient your flowchart accordingly. If you’re going for a funnel, orient it from the top down, so you can visualize the process you’re taking your visitors through as it’s actually happening. If your site’s purpose is to tell a story, orient your flowchart from left to right, the natural progression of reading.
Changing your flowchart’s orientation to match your purpose will help you design it with your end goal in mind.
Keep It Flowing
Regardless of whether you’re designing a top-down or left to right flowchart, it’s essential to keep it flowing in one direction. Otherwise, your flowchart will make your head spin before you can even make sense of it.
The biggest culprit of a confusing flowchart: the choice diamond. The diamond represents a diverging path in a flowchart, where the user has the option to make a choice about their next path. This choice will either set them down one leg of the flowchart or the other.
The problems begin once even more choice diamonds are implemented in those additional legs. Pretty soon, you’ll have a game of Chickenfoot going in a thousand directions. That’s the opposite of what you want.
Instead of relying on the choice diamond and sprouting new flowchart legs all over the place, simply convert that choice diamond to a simple action rectangle and keep the chart flowing normally.
You’ll still create a new leg for each choice, but those legs will stay consistent with the flow of your chart, either going from the top down or from the left to the right. This is the easiest way to ensure your flowchart stays easy to read throughout your design process.
Use a Key
Have you ever seen a flowchart with lots of different shapes involved? Did you wonder why it wasn’t just composed of squares and arrows?
Flowcharts use a variety of shapes to denote different things. For instance, a pill shape represents the start or end of something on a flow chart. A rectangle represents an actionable step in a process.
In order to keep your flowchart organized, harness the power of flowchart shapes. You can’t just use squares for everything, because different areas of your site will operate differently. You need to account for that in your flowchart design, and a shapes key can help you.
Use a Flow Chart Design Software
Using a flowchart design software is hands down the easiest way to plan your website design flow chart. Software like Slickplan feature user-friendly, drag and drop flowchart elements to help you visualize your site’s user experience from landing page to opt-in.
With good flowchart design and quality copy, you can even turn your website into its own sales funnel. Your visitors will click through exactly the way you want them to. You can design your flowchart to land them on your sales page, or an opt-in page to get them on your email list.
Your Website’s Flowchart Design
Now that you’ve read up on some of the most essential elements of good flowchart design, you should be on your way to crafting the perfect funnel on your site to attract new clients to your business!
Want to read more tips and tricks for web design? Check out our other web design articles to get those creative juices flowing!
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