Flowcharts

GroRate.com Flowchart

Over the last few months, I've been developing a new website for rating groceries.  It's a community-based site that allows people to look up basic nutritional info on thousands of grocery products and rate them. 

To the left is a flowchart for the entire site; I used Visio's flowchart shapes to create it.  What's interesting about flowcharts is that they help you think about what all the moving pieces of a website or application are and how they interact together. It's a really useful tool to gain insight into any process—flowcharting helps you to understand how often users have to think and make decisions, which can help you see when processes need to be simplified.