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For mac / iOS Omnigraffle is popular for that sort of thing, if what you want is to make connected-block arrow-heavy flow diagrams quickly. I don't use it myself, but I know a few information designers who swear by it as a simple way to put together an outline for a diagram, organise their thoughts and get the layout, content and structure right. They ...

"Easy to use" is a bit of a challenge is that's going to depend on a whole lot of criteria. That said, I'd suggest Inkscape. It's open source, so is no cost to give it a try. It's not as robust as Adobe Illustrator, so would argue that it's simpler to learn. And it can certainly save out in many formats, including it's native format SVG.

Adobe Illustrator actually has some very under-utilized capabilities to enhance chart representations of data. There's a good tutorial by Mordy Golding here, and his Lynda.com tutorials also go into this in excellent detail. For the kind of work I do, I'll use Illustrator in this way, or build things by hand. For inspiration, and to give you an idea of how ...

Option 1 Inkscape as already suggested if you don't intend to use it often or want to spend several 100 dollars. Option 2 Buy the design edition of Adobe CS6. I say buy the design package because at the rate of just purchasing Illustrator it is a waste. You can buy the design package which would include Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat. ...

My favourite software for this is actually a web-based editor, Cacoo. It's very good at most linked diagram styles (both your examples are quite easy to make with Cacoo), and is much more user-friendly than Visio (though not as in-depth). It's also cross-platform due to it being web-based, and seems to have an offline mode, though I don't use that ...

What problem are you trying to solve? The approach and therefore best tools depend on... Are you visualising data to (a) analyse it, explore it or open it up, or to (b) communicate a specific, known message about it? Who is your audience? In particular, are they (a) casual people who's interest you want to attract (e.g. readers of a magazine, people ...

I see a lot about professional and commercial software here, so this one might be a bit off-side: I use LaTeX and TikZ (which is a LaTeX package) for visualization. If I am able to draw and structure my data on a piece of paper, I can also do the same thing with TikZ. The approach is 100% text based, not at all intuitive to beginners, but very powerful. ...