Mind Maps: the Poor Man's Design Tool

CowboyRobot writes "'UML too complex? Flowcharts too old school? Mind maps offer a simple way to capture designs and weave them together elegantly.' The quickest way to begin designing a program is to simply write down the steps in normal text, but this method breaks down with more complex projects. UML can be a useful format for larger projects but can be difficult to get right, especially when trying to use it with a less conventional project. The middle ground are 'Mind Maps,' 'a diagrammatic representation of loosely connected ideas. They are a central tool in brainstorming sessions. Mind map tools help capture ideas and then mush them around until you have the structure you want.'"

Comments

Oh boy

[Mska]

Slashdot discovers mind maps. News at 11.

Re:Oh boy

[stephanruby]

Slashdot discovers mind maps. News at 11.

Wait until you guys discover doodling... Doodling is my secret competitive advantage.

And unlike mind mapping, you don't need some fancy software to do it with, I doodle my ideas on paper napkins, pizza boxes, and unopened envelopes all the time.

Re:Oh boy

[isorox]

Slashdot discovers mind maps. News at 11.

Wait until you guys discover doodling... Doodling is my secret competitive advantage.

And unlike mind mapping, you don't need some fancy software to do it with, I doodle my ideas on paper napkins, pizza boxes, and unopened envelopes all the time.

What's wrong with opened envelopes?

Re:Oh boy

[thatskinnyguy]

Perhaps you can come back to myspace and doodle my google til its reddit and I yahoo all over your facebook.

Re:Oh boy

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

unopened envelopes

What's wrong with opened envelopes?

Much cheaper: you get less bills

I suspect

[AliasMarlowe]

I suspect we all know what a Mind Map is, and what their uses are. Alas, I don't know of any program which implements the original concept for Mind Maps (BBC2's "Use Your Head" series from the 1970s). Does any existing program support cyclic relationships, for example? Other than as a hack with external arrows or similar added as decorations.

Re:I suspect

[Bill Currie]

Actually, I'd been working as a programmer for about 15 years before I heard of mind maps, and that was in a TESOL training course, so I suspect that not everyone knows what a mind map is.

Re:I suspect

[shaitand]

That doesn't make the submission news. Forget reading TFA, there is no FA.

Re:I suspect

[digitig]

Vue from Tufts university supports cyclic relationships. It also has good tools for plotting routes through a mind map which are good for getting a linear form out of a model. I use it a lot for complex reports and essays, with good results.

Re:I suspect

[AliasMarlowe]

Use Your Head is a book by Tony Buzan (not sure if he had any input in the BBC2 series). I do not think you will find a suitable program since part of the learning process is designing your own map with associated colours and visual triggers.

Yes, I have his book, and he was behind the BBC2 series in the 1970s. I watched the series, and found the information quite useful in general life and in studies (but not great for lecture notes in math, science, or engineering topics). Unfortunately, his ideas degraded between the TV series and the book and software, so that the mind maps in his book involve branching from a central concept without cycles. I really wish the TV series was still available, but it can't be found on the BBC shop, and it was broadcast in the days before video recorders were common.

Re:I suspect

[war4peace]

That's exactly what I disliked about mind maps. They're too damn limited. You have a central point and stem all your directions from there. But cyclic relations don't exist, also you can't make any many-to-one or one-to-many references. If point X refers to more than one branch, you'd have to hack the mind map to display it.

Re:I suspect

[mikael_j]

That may be but I'm pretty sure a lot of people know about mind maps. Hell, here in Sweden I was "taught" how to use mind maps in school sometime around grade 5, then again for grade 8 and finally a couple of years later in high school. And so were all my classmates.

Re:I suspect

[gl4ss]

Actually, I'd been working as a programmer for about 15 years before I heard of mind maps, and that was in a TESOL training course, so I suspect that not everyone knows what a mind map is.

well, judging by your slashdot id it's entirely possible you went to school in the fifties but for the rest of us this is really is a blast from elementary school.

Re:I suspect

[JaredOfEuropa]

Most mindmaps boil down to a visual representation of a hierarchical list, with some comments and maybe a few extra relationships added. As a visual representation they are great for individual ideation, brainstorming, or even scoping functional designs. In those cases you're working with concepts that fit a taxonomy but are otherwise only loosely interrelated (as far as matters for the mapping exercise). A lot of what you're doing there is fitting items into the taxonomy, checking whether every (sub)category is complete, and tweaking the taxonomy itself. Mind maps are a very useful visualisation for such tasks, and even for people new to the concept they are simple enough to understand and work with.

But design work? Things like ordering and complex flows are not naturally captured very well in a mindmap. The mindmaps in the Dr. Dobbs article appear to me as rather awkward flow diagrams. There are better representations; even a simple indented list might work better for the examples given. I have used mindmaps when designing software, but in those cases I used them to map out functional areas of the software, break down each area in distinct tasks and perhaps subtasks, but I stopped at the level where timing, order and interdependencies become important.

Re:I suspect

[lee1]

A prominent one would be graphviz, of course. But most other software that describes itself as dealing with "mind maps" can only handle a basic tree structure, you're right. Another exception would be Tinderbox, but that's closed source.

Re:I suspect

[3dr]

Back in my youth, I had the thought that, since I'm drawing it on paper, I should be able to connect *this blob* with *that* blob by drawing a line...

It was a risky thought, since mind maps were always taught to be acyclic, but as was common, no one else was around when I created these diagrams. I contemplated what path it would lead me down if I decided to try this. It may lead to such infractions as tearing the consumer information tags off all my mattresses, but that was a moral risk to my very core that I decided to take.

The fateful day came. Well, it was actually the same day as when I got the thought of taking such drastic action in one of my graphical creations, and in fact it was just mere seconds later, but whatever, there I was facing my destiny. After a feverish last glance around, I tried it, using my Berol Prismacolor Copenhagen Blue PC 906, and it worked! I connected two already-connected orange blobs with a blue arrow! I wiped the sweat from my hands on my pants, and continued to decorate the new incestuous interloper with a halo of bright green dots.

In the years since that discovery, I have wisened a bit, lost a little of that rebellion hellion, and promised myself, my family, and my country that I would never attempt such a risky diagrammatic insurgency as that! I should be following the rules!

(I don't remember ever learning about "mind maps" in elementary school (in the 70's), and while looking for diagramming tools I stumbled upon a "Mind Maps" book in 2004 or so. For software developers such as myself, much of what a mind map attempts to do is what we already do (mentally or on a whiteboard) when gathering requirements, or brainstorming app structure, or even user experience. But what struck me as so silly about mind maps was the emphasis on coloring/doodling within very structured organizational rules. It is a real dichotomy. BTW, I do not actually own a Berol Prismacolor Copenhagen Blue PC 906, although it is real. Very real.)

Re:Ahem

[Dr_Barnowl]

I don't know - it's a free / open source mind mapping tool he recommends.

Re:Brainstorming

[moodel]

Mind Maps are basically digitized "brainstorms" that we were all (some?) taught in school. Digitizing anything comes at a cost: Using the UI. Usually pencil and paper is way more freeform and faster, but having your ideas digitized has some intense nerd value!

No not all of us were taught this in school. Also there are mind maps and mind maps. Tony Buzan is the man for the classic mind mapping techniques but people should try to evolve their own and like myself will often develop their own shorthand in the process which makes note taking and mind map design so much easier.

I like FreeMind

[I cant believe its n]

I like FreeMind (mentioned in the DrDobbs article). Of course I knew about mind maps before, but the ability to export a perfectly formated map as Pdf, HTML and in various image formats is great. I think I'll be using this instead of paper in the future. I've tried various UML design tools in the past, but they all require that you have already made some of the decisions beforehand.

I think UML is a great way of describing a system once you have made all major decisions, but whenever I need to think about a new project, I have always prefered pen and paper. I'll seriously give FreeMind a go now.

Post-It notes and watercooler gossip

[Rogerborg]

You can spend a week in a tiger team lock-in session, mind mapping the shizzle out of your next project. Eventually, a desperate delirium sets in, and you'll agree to anything just to get out of there. Thus the design is "finalised".

Then by the time you get back to your keyboard, some executive vice president of marketing is accidentally exposed to a copy of Wired, and decides that instead of writing an app to keep recipes on, what you really need is to ride the frontsurge to a collaboratively cloudsourced web 3.0 win-win solution, and the charade starts all over again.

Experience starts to look a lot like cynicism after a while.

Re:Post-It notes and watercooler gossip

[mwvdlee]

Brainstorming exists to give dumb people a false sense of ownership over the smart guy's ideas.

Re:Post-It notes and watercooler gossip

[JaredOfEuropa]

Brainstorm session are a great way to get buy-in from others if you need it... But not all sessions are like that. If you are genuinely interested in the outcome of such a session, be selective about who you invite. Leave the dumb people out of it, and get a diverse group of smart people.

Mind maps are limited

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

If you have a group of people unused to thinking then you can draw pretty lines and boxes together in a friendly sort of way. It is a social thing like ten people going to the kitchen to cook a meal.

If you are an experienced thinker then you probably need time (in ways you have got used to eg On waking-up or hiking or "Shut up! I've just had an idea!") to note your thoughts and see where they lead. You're quite likely to have ways of grouping and ordering notes on [bits of] paper which just happen. The only software you need is a pencil and scrap paper.

If you are one of the 90% of people who don't use analysis and imagination then you need prompts and buckets. Prompts to ask say 'what are the sub-tasks' and buckets to keep similar things together. MM don't have prompts and the buckets are very generic. For a particular task such people need particular headings to put 'first answers' into.

Re:Brainstorming

[mwvdlee]

You make a very poignant argument, but it fails to address that fact that yes, they are.

Re:UML

[LourensV]

I suspect that for most people, the reason to use a mind map rather than UML would not be UML's complexity. UML scales pretty well: a bunch of boxes with names in them and lines between them to signal what is related to what is a valid UML class diagram already. Instead, I think the problem with UML is that it forces you to think very carefully about what exactly it is that you're going to create. Back in the 1960's and 1970's, people like Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra advocated careful thinking about software, rigid specification, and proving correct any important algorithms. They saw software as a mathematical construct, and the exercise of building software as akin to proving theorems.

Fast forward to the Internet age. Software is everywhere, and rare is the project where the customer can tell you clearly what they want. The small cadre of people who are capable of the precise and abstract thought required to do programming the mathematical way is not by far big enough to write all the software that the world needs, so even if customers could make rigid specifications, most programmers would find them written in an alien language. So we have adopted a biological rather than mathematical approach: specifications are never exact, software is always broken, but it's okay because the software has an immune system (we call it vendor support), which fixes up errors continuously. In such a world, maybe a mind map is as formal a description as you need.

Personally, I used UML to describe a logical data model in my last big project. I was the only one with a formal CS background in the project, but everyone understood the diagrams just fine. I had to explain a few more advanced things to some people, but it was no problem. And we did think everything through very carefully, and so far the whole thing is holding up very well because of that. In my opinion, even in the age of agile development and web technologies, careful thought is still invaluable in software development, and a diagram language that lets you specify a bit more detail when you need it is a very useful tool. I'll stick with UML.

You'll be better off with the fork, Freeplane

[sgtrock]

Undoing mod points to post this. If you like FreeMind, you really need to try out Freeplane. Much more functional than FreeMind on so many levels. :-)

Compendium is terrific

[Paul Fernhout]

Video of me using Compendium in real time to create a concept map of a discussion: http://barcamp.org/w/page/47221410/Desktop%20or%20Mobile%20or%20Web

No video, but here is the concept map made in real-time with Compendium in another workshop at the 2011 Capitol Camp:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/47222818/Tools%20for%20Collective%20Sensemaking%20and%20Civic%20Engagement