So in a lot of blog articles the author is creating a story to validate his/her own opinion well this is not one of those blogs.  The team here at Elsinore has spent a good bit of time this past week reviewing workflow best practices and how workflows should look and feel to users.  We thought it would be great to hear from our customers and anyone else visiting our blog on what they thought about workflow design practices.

Sparking from the discussion about swimlanes a new question has arisen.  When do all these possible design elements start making our graphical representation more confusing than helpful?  There are a lot of organizations globally working on standardizing best practices for workflows one of the most notable is business process modeling notation (BPMN).  Workflows can be designed at a high level only outlining the general scope of the process keeping the layout simple.  Or they can be very detailed to the point of showing exactly what activities are being performed; who the emails are going to, what divisions are doing the work, who is responsible for scheduling the meeting, etc.  The information is all available but the key is balance, what elements do you think are important?  And should workflow designers’ error on the side of simplicity or informative?