Mind Maps: the Poor Man's Design Tool 97
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.'"
Oh boy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh boy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
unopened envelopes
What's wrong with opened envelopes?
Much cheaper: you get less bills
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Got a diagram for that ?
Re:Oh boy (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Ahem...
Mind mapping is perfectly possible using pen and paper. Actually, IMNSHO it is much better than using a program as there are no constraints on how you make the mind map. You might call it structured doodling :-)
Re:Ahem (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know - it's a free / open source mind mapping tool he recommends.
I suspect (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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That doesn't make the submission news. Forget reading TFA, there is no FA.
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It's pretty well-known in the UK - I think we covered it in school.
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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.
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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.
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I'm about to turn 29, and live in the UK. We didn't cover mind maps in school. However I heard of them about 3 years ago when the head of our Engineering dept got me to make a tool for exporting data from one of our web apps into a format that could be viewed using Freemind [sourceforge.net].
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:) Ok, tiger, good one. Made me laugh (but quietly, since I'm in a cube farm).
I can guarantee you no one on my team (of developers, of varying ages) knows what mind maps are, except our BA, who got handed one by someone on ANOTHER team.
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Re:I suspect (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I suspect (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Unfortunately, his ideas degraded between the TV series and the book and software
There also seems to be a bunch of First Earth Battalion style prose in a recent edition of The Mind Map Book ("We dedicate this book to all those Warriors of the Mind fighting in the Century of the Brain and Millenium of the Mind for the expansion and freedom of Human Intelligence"). Apparently this stuff can pretty much turn you into a Jedi:
"The Mentally Literate Human is capable of turning on the radiant synergistic thinking engines, and creating conceptual frameworks and new paradigms of limitless possib
Re:I suspect (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
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Ditto.
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I never "got" what's so special about mindmaps. It seems just like how used to flesh out ideas on paper for as long as I can remember (well before my first computer at the very least), but using a specific notation style. In practice I found being forced to use mindmap-style distracts from the actual thought processes it's supposed to help.
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Re:I suspect (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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No they aren't.
Re:Brainstorming (Score:5, Funny)
You make a very poignant argument, but it fails to address that fact that yes, they are.
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Let's take the computerized part first. You can draw them on paper - indeed, when they originated computers capable of running mind mapping software would have been very rare. So you're already 50% full of shit.
Brainstorming is an unstructured way of generating ideas. Mind mapping involves taking a central idea and building on it, refining it and/or adding detail.
Truly, your crap runneth over.
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You could also use a scanner or "digital pen" and get most of the benefits of both.
Compendium (Score:2)
Compendium [open.ac.uk]
Compendium is terrific (Score:3)
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 [barcamp.org]
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 [barcamp.org]
I like FreeMind (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Too linear. No cyclic stuff in it. Apart from that, it looks pretty cool, and the exports are pretty awesome.
You'll be better off with the fork, Freeplane (Score:5, Informative)
Undoing mod points to post this. If you like FreeMind, you really need to try out Freeplane. [sourceforge.net] Much more functional than FreeMind on so many levels. :-)
I think FreeMind is harmful (Score:1)
I counseled one thesis where the student was awestruck by FreeMind. His highest level of achievement was to cram the whole topic into one gargantuan mind map. That didn't help him write one line, and seemed more to hinder his ability to start working from any particular point.
Instead, when he was sinking into desperation, I sat down with him and we basically brainstormed [wikipedia.org] the whole topic all over again and put it down to a bullet list [wikipedia.org], which turned into a preliminary index [wikipedia.org], and each top level bullet was su
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Basically, write the headings first then the sub-headings. Depending on the end product there may be several more levels of 'sub'.
When you reach the desired level, you fill them in with text.
Of course there's no way you can sell training courses, seminars & software based on common sense...
Not too bad..but limited logic (Score:2)
Beyond mind maps, there are Warnier-Orr digrams. One of the bigest disappointments in software is that Varatek hasn't upgraded B-Liner so it runs well on Windows 7. For small systems design, it was great.
http://varatek.com/ [varatek.com]
Post-It notes and watercooler gossip (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Brainstorming exists to give dumb people a false sense of ownership over the smart guy's ideas.
Re:Post-It notes and watercooler gossip (Score:5, Insightful)
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A properly managed brainstorming session is a great tool for generating ideas. Some minds (such as mine) work really well in a brainstorming environment. One person says one thing, it leads to another, and through an associative process a whole bunch of ideas will come out. Lots of them will suck, but that's ok because sometimes a sucky idea will trigger someone to have a great idea. Only when the session is finished to you start evaluating them.
You ought to be careful using brainstorming to get a person to
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Clearly, you've never seen smart people brainstorming.
Years ago, the dev team I worked on white boarded everything, and usually did our design by locking ourselves in a room until we'd fleshed out what we were doing. We called it the Screeching Howler Monkey method.
Everybody contributed, we listened to the various ideas and weighed them. Looked at what worked and what didn't work, and decided on what we could do
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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".
You're brutally right here. Brainstorming is fine for coming up with ideas. Design by comity is almost always a guarantee that a system will perform the bare minimum without ever being able to achieve the perceived full potential and more.
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Never heard of it. Sounds quite friendly [merriam-webster.com] though.
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Ah yes, dilbert covered that part of my education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fJiK02_Rx0 [youtube.com]
Mind maps are limited (Score:2)
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. T
Dr Dobbs (Score:2)
This is not the same as the Dr Dobbs of 1994, 1995 and prior :-(
WTF is going to happen next? A description of using a text file to write down high level concepts then inserting indented lines that break the concepts into even more pieces? Then, indent again and break down even further! You could even call the non-indented lines functions, the lines with one indent a function as well, and the lines with 3 or more indents pseudocode for the functions! Maybe you could even use this text file to produce comment
HyperList (Score:1)
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UML (Score:1)
yep. User Mode Linux is definitely too complicated to use for any real serious business work, as any slashdotter knows. we should all be using the latest and greatest version of windows with a large coloured tile of applications full-screen, just like a mind-map except regular and safe and already laid out with the paths predefined, so that we don't have to think or use any creativity at all. yes! that's it! we should all get lobotomies, stare at pretty squares and be happy to live in our brainwashed s
Re:UML (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It is extremely valuable, you just have to be carefull about what you want to spend time carefully thinking about.
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Forget Mind Maps (Score:1)
As mentioned above they can't handle complex data structures (or much data at all). Wiki-based software is better.
http://zim-wiki.org/
http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/
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As mentioned above they can't handle complex data structures (or much data at all). Wiki-based software is better.
http://zim-wiki.org/
http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
There's a lot of things they don't do well.
I like FreeMind as an idea organizer. Especially since, although it has a very nice GUI, you can rapidly outline stuff using only the keyboard. But FreeMind is just the overview where I do my brainstorming. Once I start adding diagrams and tables and schemas, I either hyperlink it to something more suitable (like pages in a wiki) or I run an XSLT on the freemind file to produce a prototype ODF ("Word") outline document.
Didn't we talk about these a few years ago? (Score:2)
I spent an hour and a half yesterday jotting down the design for a fairly small supporting application I'm planning to write, pushing some objects around on paper unt
Not a new idea - (Score:2)
When I was very young, I used to swear by a book by Tony Buzan that was very much along these lines. The title was "Using Both Sides of Your Brain" or something like that. It was helpful to me though it made my class notes unreadable to anyone else. (This was before it occured to me to use computers for these things.)
Mindjet Mindmanager rocks (Score:2)
Poor Man's Design Tool? (Score:1)
poor man's? (Score:1)
"Fuzzy" Mind Maps: Ketso (Score:1)
I've used Ketso [ketso.com] for mind mapping in a group product design brainstorm session. It worked really well for capturing everybody's ideas and grouping them to come up with common themes and shared ideas. I know its a bit low-tech, but its nice to get away from the computer sometimes.