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

[thatskinnyguy]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.)

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.

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. :-)