I am always running across software designed to “mindmap”:
Buzan’s iMindMap Ultimate - 4.0
And so on.
I open it up, look around…and I don’t get it. What is the benefit? Does it really help? What is it supposed to do?
And I can read the descriptions, I’m just looking for the real user experience to make it make more sense to me.
I haven’t used those. I have used Excel’s boxes, arrows, and shape library to create some pretty elaborate things. However, I was using it to document the layout of a networked system or code flow.
I have, on the rare occasion, gone from a flow chart first to code after but personally I didn’t find it to speed the process any.
But I’ve never found any particular use in brainstorming with a crowd of people. In general, I think, you’re better off to give the task to one person to come up with a design, then let other people fling poo at it. Again, something like Excel’s boxes and arrows charting is a nice way to come up with graphical displays of elements and how they correlate. But I’d probably go with Excel over specialized software since Excel actually works really nice for it (much better than Word, PowerPoint, and all the UML software I’ve seen) doesn’t have unnecessarily pretty graphics, doesn’t constrain you to any particular “theory of design”, and of course gives you all of Excel.
I use them all the time!
Mindjet is my tool of choice.
There are tons of different ways one could use the tool (kind of like asking what one uses Excel for), but I use it as a fancy outlining tool.
A typical mind map has the main subject in the center with branches extending radially; you read it by starting at 3 o’clock and going clockwise.
The best thing about it is that your whole outline is visible at the same time and you can start dragging nodes around, rearranging your thoughts. Imagine having a node that has five subtopics and sixteen sub-sub-topics, along with hyperlinks and other goodies. You can immediately drag that node to another place in the tree, rearranging your thoughts.
You can make links between nodes in different parts of the map as well. There are lots of other features, but those are the ones I use.
Mindjet’s tool supports exporting to Word and PowerPoint. I have made many PowerPoint presentations by exporting a fancy mind map to slides; the nodes become slides, with subnodes becoming headers and bullet items.
I made a PowerPoint template that incorporated our corporate slide template and generated the decks from my mind maps.
Its a brainstorming tool for recording and collecting and organizing brainstorming sessions. I generally prefer other methods (my brain likes affinity diagrams much more than mindmaps), though there are situations working with a team where the mindmap is the obvious way to capture thoughts. Particularly when their are a lot of thoughts to organize and you are still trying to get your arms around it.
I know people who love them for individual use - not a fan there, but if it helps them organize their thoughts, I’m not arguing with them.
Well, I understand that that is what it is for, I am just having trouble understanding why its’ useful to do it that way. But I guess it sort of boils down to being a visual processor of information, which I’m not so much.
But I am trying to organize a big project with lots of sub-particles, so to speak, so maybe I should give it a try…