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Idea

Add Universal Process Notation (UPN) shapes to the standard shapes library

Related products:Lucidchart
  • February 7, 2024
  • 13 replies
  • 537 views

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Universal Process Notation (UPN) is another business process modeling format. It’s simpler than BPMN and it has been adopted by Salesforce which means that it’s very popular in my world.

I would love to see a standard library to support UPN. Here’s a few resources that describe how it works. It uses only a couple of shapes with some special behaviors.

Resources explaining UPN:

https://unitfly.com/insights/what-is-universal-process-notation-upn/

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/Universal-Process-Notation-UPN#:~:text=UPN%20was%20developed%20in%20the,Software%20acquired%20Nimbus%20in%202011.)
https://elements.cloud/blog/upn/

 

February 7, 2024

Hi, thanks for this idea! We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post:

 

Comments

Micah
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  • Lucid community team
  • February 7, 2024

Hi, thanks for this idea! We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post:

 


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  • February 27, 2024

UPN is also great for Salesforce specific Business Analysts.
Please check below description regarding UPN by Salesforce Trailhead
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/business-process-mapping/understand-universal-process-notation


Micah
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  • Lucid community team
  • February 27, 2024

@obidjon Thanks for this additional context!

 


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  • January 10, 2025

To be clear, this pretty much just needs one dynamic shape to be created as the specification is incredibly simple. If I could create a custom shape manually, this would be dead easy to implement.


Ambar D
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  • Lucid community team
  • January 13, 2025

Hi ​@DavidB80, thank you for adding to this thread! This is the perfect place to get your ideas and feedback in front of the product team.

We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post!


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  • May 30, 2025

It’s not just the shape attributes that are helpful, the core use of drillability in UPN is a huge benefit for diagram reuse across varient audiences.  This is supported by use of links in Lucid but it’s nowhere near as seamless as you can find in some other products, e.g. q9Elements.  

For now, I created a library for use by my team, but it would be better if Lucid brought some of the behavioral functionality of UPN into its platform.


Ambar D
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  • Lucid community team
  • June 2, 2025

Hi ​@jpfazzan,  thank you for adding this feedback! I certainly understand why this is important to you. This remains the thread to receive any updates on this from our product teams.


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  • June 4, 2025

UPN has the potential to become the standard for non technical process mapping, meaning that the audience for UPN diagrams is much larger than the audience for other notations. It’s not just a feature Lucid would be adding. I think you would make the tool more appealing to a wider audience.   


Ambar D
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  • Lucid community team
  • June 4, 2025

Hi ​@igroppe, thank you for your insights on this and your feedback here!


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  • August 4, 2025

UPN would be a great addition. It is the next generation way of communicating processes to non-technical audience and Lucid not having it is forcing us to go to tools that do. 


Ambar D
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  • Lucid community team
  • August 4, 2025

Thank you ​@markoanic for taking the time to add your feedback and support for this feature to be implemented!


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Hello -- this continues to be the biggest limitation from LucidChart. At the very least, a set of objects/shapes that support UPN would be welcomed to start. A process square with space for “Persona” and “System” is really all that’s needed.

It doesn’t have to drill down like elements.cloud, or use reusable Personas/Systems just yet, however that is a big benefit of elements.cloud.

Additionally, pulling in salesforce metadata would be cool, but again, not 100% needed vs. simple UPN notation.


Ambar D
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  • Lucid community team
  • August 7, 2025

Hi ​@faraz.khan@allcloud.io, thank you for adding your feedback to this thread. I certainly understand why this is important I appreciate you taking the time to let us know how you’d benefit from this. 

The product team regularly reviews feedback within threads like these in the Product Feedback space as they continue to research product enhancements and improvements.