Re:How to draw beautiful software architecture diagrams (2022)
by ska on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:46PM
(#38043709)
Sure!
We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard.
Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person.
After a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio)
Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. The "single picture" part didn't seem to work as well.
Another thing is that we never found a digital place that has the same mental priority as big whiteboard in the common area. There was a lot of "where did we put that, is it attached to meeting or on the folder X or ...
On the whole I thought it was more positive than negative, but over time they were definitely being used less and less.
A couple of the team absolutely loved them for diagramming and completely replaced other tools for that.
To be fair, it was a "forced experiment" during covid lockdowns initially, so could certainly have been executed better.
We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard.
Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person.
After a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio)
Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. The "single picture" part didn't seem to work as well.
Another thing is that we never found a digital place that has the same mental priority as big whiteboard in the common area. There was a lot of "where did we put that, is it attached to meeting or on the folder X or ...
On the whole I thought it was more positive than negative, but over time they were definitely being used less and less.
A couple of the team absolutely loved them for diagramming and completely replaced other tools for that.
To be fair, it was a "forced experiment" during covid lockdowns initially, so could certainly have been executed better.