Create animated flow in Lucidchart

Hi @shirad, 

Thanks for your post! Unfortunately, this isn’t currently supported in Lucid, but we’re very interested in your feedback and committed to continually improving our products. If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear more details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience within this thread.

I’ve also converted this post to an idea so that it’s visible to others within the Product Feedback section of the community - from here, they can upvote it and add details of their own.

Finally, for more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post: 

Thank you Flavia.

We build complex integration and data flow architectures based on a large array of business/technical use cases across multiple industries, and present the end to end solution to a wider team and personas, like engineers, product managers, business teams, IT, and C-Level executives, partners … etc

Many of which need to deep dive into the end-to-end architecture, and/or take quick executive decisions.

We also embed many of those architectures in our generic presentations, documentation, and knowledge base.

Having static links means that we need to spend more time explaining our solution, and answering many of the commonly repeated questions. For our documentation, this means writing more to explain the flows, while customers spend more time reading.

On the other hand, animated flows speak for themselves, and this allows the majority of the audience to quickly understand the data flows within a complex architecture.

This saves time, looks better, and is clear for all personas.

We also have been asked by many customers to animate complex solution architectures so that it’s easy for them to clearly evaluate the big picture. These architecture includes bot flows, application integration, middleware, service bus, communication protocols, data management, SSO, infrastructure design, network (VPN, VLAN, Firewall … etc), voice infra, and core technologies, … etc.

So imagine that we start with static flows in the preliminary phases, they become complex, and then we need to find a way to animate them. It’s like re-doing the majority of the work again as we need to re-align many components to fit the changed flows, versus, we apply animation from the beginning and scale as we go along.

We couldn’t do it in lucid, so we looked at draw.io and managed there at the moment.

In short, the animated flows feature in Lucid will help to:

• Quickly modernize our existing architectures without using external tools
• Start building new flows with animation from the very beginning
• Ensure different personas can view the big picture of complex architecture, easily

I hope this helps to get this feature built in lucid.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Hi @shirad, 

Thanks for providing additional details use case! 🙌  We highly value users' inputs when prioritizing improvements to Lucid! This detailed description will help promote your idea to our product team and to other Lucid users, who can now upvote it. Thanks for your contribution!

This feature would be a huge game changer for my team’s documentation. You can do animated flow arrows today in draw.io, but I love using Lucid Chart and don’t really want to use another tool. Please consider prioritizing this, even if it’s a basic version! 

Seems very similar to this idea too, right?  

IMO it’s different - the ask here is literally just to add an animation to a path (arrow, whatever). So, when you view the chart, you can see the flow diagrams in realtime.

The presentations one, would basically be a way to “step through” a predetermined flow and zoom in / highlight each part of a flow. I think the animation would go hand in hand with making a compelling presentation, but it’s separate.