Ensuring your process map is readable is the most important best practice, after all what’s the use if its correct, but illegible. Flow is best defined by following the way that most of us read, left to right and top to bottom works for many process maps.
For the most part, landscape is the way to go, giving you the most space for tasks and making it easier to document the sequence of tasks in a logical order.
Optimal flow when laying out a flow chart. Making it easy for the reader to follow the path of work or activities.
In addition to following this flow pattern, limit the number of tasks per page. A typical page size will accommodate 8-12 tasks comfortably, after that it’s going to start to get crowded. As many process maps are now published to the web, keeping this ratio will make the map readable without having to zoom in to get to the detail required.
A good set of guidelines are contained in this TaskMap style guide, which can be applied for almost any process mapping application.
Copyright 2010 Harvard Computing Group, Inc. Sign up for email delivery
