First of all, I’m really excited about this product. It’s hands down the best online diagramming tool I’ve used (and I’m quite picky). It does so many things really well (and better than other tools I’ve seen), and is an indispensable tool for communicating complex information effectively. Thank you and many kudos to the team!
There is one feature that in my mind would really elevate the application to another level, and that’s layers – the ability to separate items (both items placed on the canvas, and comments) into different contexts, which could be labelled and toggled visible or invisible.
Whimsical is such a great tool for quickly communicating a LOT of information and provides a great foundation for visual team collaboration, however even making use of color, font-size and different fill/outline styles, it is difficult to present necessary information for one user type (eg, developer) without creating a lot of confusing visual clutter for another user type (eg, designer, product manager). The ability to separate concerns into different layers would mean that different users types could customize their view to focus on the information / discussions relevant to them.
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Also, when I’m logged in, I haven’t figured out how to navigate to the home page in order to find the community. (Whimsical.com automatically redirects me to my projects, and I can’t find a menu option to visit the homepage without logging out)
I also think this feature would help with the clunkiness of managing items inside of other items. We always have issues getting rectangles to lie in the proper spot.
Hi Stephen - I’m Todd, a product designer here at Whimsical. Thanks for the request!
We’ve heard a few requests for layers and I’d love to dig in to the specific use cases. If you’d be open to chatting a bit more, I have some time open on my calendar.
If not, no worries – the background context you provided is quite helpful!
Hey Stephen, welcome! I hope you get a chance to speak to Todd, he’s awesome! In the meantime, I wanted to let you know that you can get to the community inside the by using the icon in the bottom right
Hi Kailyn - I’d love to hear more about the rectangle problems, feel free to send a message in the bottom right with a screenshot or video if you have one, and I’ll take a look
@Jan I think I might have a solution for you when it comes to swimlanes in particular. Would you mind sending me a message at help@whimsical.com?
In short, if you group the background of the swimlane and make sure it’s sent to the very back, you should be able to resize it and move it without interfering with other items:
I would also really like to see a layers feature (currently looking at how we track automated feature coverage and would like to have an overlay of our architecture mindmaps). Read this article How we manage our projects with Whimsical | Whimsical and also would be interested to know how whimsical track coverage
Another vote here for layers. I increasingly am using whimsical for visual storytelling / presentations. Right now I am using blocks to cover up and then reveal parts of pictures. I used to use layers in omnigraffle for this purpose and it was very effective…
here’s where we are today (point to a thing) … and now here’s where we’re going! (reveal the new thing by enabling a layer)
Layers please! I need to build multi-org/multi-team/multi-capability workflows and only want to show what is relevant for whichever group, and still keep the entirety of the workflow for the systems SMEs. Plus it would be excellent for before/after views.
Layers would be amazing! I need to rapidly show different departments responsibilities/flow overlayed on a standard workflow, being able to quickly switch the view for each one would be great.
Layers! This would really streamline our workflows and how we build our diagrams. A simple but really affective tool. Please consider this as a new release/update! @Whimsical
