Trapeze Group

Alex Ni, CTO at Trapeze Group, has been an avid Lucidchart user for years. Although he tried his hand at many alternatives like Visio, PowerPoint, draw.io, and Gliffy, none fit the bill like Lucidchart did. According to Alex, he and his team use Lucidchart for “just about everything.” Architecture diagrams, concept diagrams, flowcharts, org charts, systems diagrams—you name it, and the team is probably creating it.

“Lucidchart has become the backbone of our collaboration for enterprise architectural knowledge. We run meetings with Lucidchart all the time. We’ll have a bunch of stakeholders in an architectural review looking at different types of diagrams, organized in a file with different tabs, and we’ll walk through different aspects of a project.

Embracing the Lucid Suite

When Lucid announced the newest member of its visual collaboration suite, Lucidspark, it came as no surprise that Alex immediately identified a use case for the new platform at Trapeze Group. The organization had a massive project coming up, and he decided to make Lucidspark their planning workspace. In order to be successful, Alex knew they needed to clearly outline out all the project’s dependencies since the project involved so many different workstreams and teams. 

Now working remotely, Alex and his team can no longer gather around a whiteboard like they used to. But they can congregate virtually around a Lucidspark board. As Alex prepared for the project planning session, he created a board and shared it across the different teams. During the meeting, every member joined the board to contribute their ideas using sticky notes, shapes, and swimlanes.

“We had 16 people on this call. In a physical room, you’d have all 16 crawling over each other to add their items to the whiteboard. With Lucidspark, we created a shared, synchronized workspace where everyone can add their ideas. We were able to get people working efficiently together on a Zoom call.”

Collaborating efficiently

The Lucidspark board provided transparency for all involved parties while also allowing participants to work without tripping over each other. Everyone was able to focus on their piece of the board and work at their own pace while still collaborating in real time. As a result, there were no bottlenecks in the process.

Alex describes, “There were a lot of activities happening in parallel, which is hard to imagine in a real boardroom or a meeting room setting because you've got parties that take the spotlight and there's a physical limitation on how much space you can have. But in a virtual environment, space becomes relative.”

Decreasing time to decision

According to Alex, Lucidspark was incredibly intuitive. “Lucidspark is the friendly, casual tool that anyone can immediately jump in and start using. You can throw stuff on the board and connect it, and it looks good. It offers us the opportunity to just have a really collaboration-focused space.” While the technical nature of other tools require users to focus on learning the tool and its ins and outs, Lucidspark allows the focus to stay on collaboration by providing an easy, streamlined, and delightful user experience.

As a result, Lucidspark ultimately decreased time to decision for Trapeze Group. Users can be onboarded quickly and then work faster within the platform.

“Generating a sticky, putting it on a board, connecting that with other stickies, or defining swimlanes—it’s highly visual. And you can put annotations and notes right on there too. So a lot of the benefit really comes down to usability and how fast somebody who has never used it can be onboarded.”

Moving forward, Alex hopes to have both Lucidchart and Lucidspark play key roles in his workflow. He’s already planning how he can explore features like voting during a user journey session or UX scrum.

Intuitive whiteboarding in Lucidspark and intelligent diagramming in Lucidchart allow the team at Trapeze Group to plan and execute more quickly and collaboratively, wherever they may be.