My Search for Mind Mapping Software

In the last few weeks I have been research­ing and eval­u­at­ing Mind Mapping soft­ware to aid me in the early plan­ning stages as well as struc­tur­ing of Web site design and re-​design projects. I think the con­cept of Mind Mapping offers a very effi­cient man­ner of gath­er­ing large amounts of data or ideas quickly then orga­nize it, for­mat it, tag it, trans­form it into an action-​plan, sched­ule, to do list or re-​use it in a mul­ti­tude of other formats.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Mind Mapping or have been look­ing for such soft­ware your­self, here’s some com­ments on my recent expe­ri­ence and short reviews of the 5 appli­ca­tions that made my short list and why. I’ve tried sev­eral oth­ers but I quickly “rejected” them for sev­eral rea­sons and I won’t men­tion them here.

You prob­a­bly should know right off the start that I am quite new to mind map­ping to begin with so my cri­te­ria and expe­ri­ence may dif­fer from some­one who’s been using it for a long time. I also plan to mostly use mind map­ping in rela­tion to the plan­ning and man­age­ment of Web site design and re-​design projects. During the course of my eval­u­a­tion, I’ve cre­ated and re-​created a map of a Web site I’ve been hired to re-​design. It’s a large Web site with a lot of con­tent as well as llinks to exter­nal resources. Re-​creating its struc­ture as a mind map has per­mit­ted me to iden­tify and note rep­e­ti­tion in con­tent, out of date con­tent and links as well as find rela­tion­ships between ele­ments found in sep­a­rate sec­tions of the site. It was the per­fect project for me to try out mind map­ping and I loved it.

The Mind Mapping Process

About the appli­ca­tions I tried them­selves, the first thing I have to tell you is that, aside from one excep­tion, it seems you really get what you pay for in the area of mind map­ping soft­ware because most mind map­ping apps only excel one area and are really weak in oth­ers. In order to under­stand what I mean by that you have to know that I divide the process of mind map­ping into 3 areas or steps. Not all areas may be as impor­tant to you as they were to me. Those area for me include, brain­storm­ing, editing/​adding infor­ma­tion and exporting.

These 3 areas are explained below:

1– The mind map­ping or brain­storm­ing process itself:
At this stage you need an app that gets out of the way and let you add top­ics and sub-​topics (some­times called ideas, nodes or items) and nav­i­gate them with the small­est amount of effort pos­si­ble. You’re try­ing to get your ideas or data down as quickly as pos­si­ble with­out any thought flow inter­rup­tions. The best apps let you start a map, then type your main idea/​topic directly then hit enter to “fin­ish” it then hit enter again to move to the next “sib­ling” topic or press Insert (close to Enter on most key­boards) to start a sub-​topic then type text again, Enter to fin­ish, Enter or Insert to move on. You would be sur­prised how many apps com­pli­cate this process need­lessly. Navigation is done sim­ply using the arrow keys. You should never have to touch the mouse to click in the map or worse still, click a but­ton in the map­ping app’s UI to add an item. Quick and sim­ple is the key here.

2– Editing and refin­ing the map by adding data and adding for­mat­ting:
This is where you add icons, rela­tion­ships, links (URLs or links to local doc­u­ments or inter­nal map top­ics, Web sites, etc), notes or attach­ments. This is also here where you for­mat the look of spe­cific items to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from one another and add fur­ther hier­ar­chy than the nat­ural topic/​sub-​topic/​sub-​sub-​topic hier­ar­chy the map con­tains nat­u­rally. This area is where all the mind map­ping apps I tried vary the most. The one I chose has the rich­est set of tools here (and I’m just start­ing to skim the sur­face), includ­ing named styles you can use to for­mat nodes/​topics eas­ily and spread changes auto­mat­i­cally to oth­ers who have the same style applied. You also need to be able to add notes to fur­ther “explain” cer­tain items or ideas fur­ther. Not all mind map­ping apps offer the abil­ity to add and for­mat notes. You also should be able to change the lay­out of the entire map. This area is very deep so I’ll stop here for now but there’s a lot of stuff you can do here to enrich the basic map data and give it more mean­ing. Some of them even give you the abil­ity to trans­form an item/​topic into a task with start and end dates, icons to denote per­cent­age of com­ple­tion and more. Several apps excel here but none of those I tried go as deep as the one I chose.

3– Exporting to other for­mats (for client deliv­er­ables like out­lines or inter­ac­tive maps they them­selves can play with for exam­ple):
This is the area where most mind map­ping apps fall very short for me with a cou­ple of excep­tions. To me and I may be one of the few think­ing this, what’s the use of cre­at­ing a detailed map if you can­not export this data into other use­ful forms. A sim­ple hier­ar­chi­cal text out­line really is some­thing very basic that should be easy to export. Even bet­ter is if links, icons and notes are exported along with the out­line and basic for­mat­ting applied to dif­fer­en­ti­ate all ele­ments. Better yet is tying the out­line lev­els to styles in an exist­ing Word tem­plate file directly. Again, only one app goes the extra mile and many do not go past the first step which is a pretty use­less sim­ple graphic export (inserted in a Word, Powerpoint or PDF file). Here, you’ll here a lot of promises of MS Office inte­gra­tion and what-​not. But if, like me, your idea of inte­gra­tion goes fur­ther than adding a solid bitmap image copy of your map to a Word or PowerPoint file with no text what­so­ever, then many mind map­ping apps will dis­ap­point you here. Only 3 apps amongst those I tried offer any­thing really use­ful here and all 3 actu­ally go above and beyond in dif­fer­ent ways.

The Reviews

So what are all these apps I’ve kept hint­ing about. I’ll spare you the worst and will only high­light 4 of them and men­tion a 5^th because I think it has great poten­tial and offers much more than mind mapping.

1– In first place and the top of the crop for me is MindManager 7 from Mindjet. It is also unfor­tu­nately one of the most expen­sive of the lot at $349.00 but it’s already help­ing me greatly start a redesign project on the right foot. This one is deep and although it doesn’t offer the stun­ning Flash export of the next sec­ond place app, MindJet offers a free reader appli­ca­tion you can point your clients to if you want them to inter­act with the real app and see things the same way you did. Otherwise it can export to Word with a full out­line, TOC, full map images and all the data and “meta­data” you added to the map. Amazing. It also has 2 fla­vors of Powerpoint export which I haven’t really explored yet. Next is Visio export. As I don’t have Visio I can­not com­ment. Next is MS Project export which ties to the tasks ori­ented edit­ing I hinted at ear­lier. I don’t have Project either but think Gantt charts and the like. Seems quite pow­er­ful. Next still is what seems like great inte­gra­tion with Outlook. Think tasks again, sched­ules and the like. I don’t use Outlook any­more and never did in that way so I can­not say how it does here. PDF export could be bet­ter but i goes beyond insert­ing a sim­ple solid graphic in a PDF file. Think editable text here (it’s rarer than you’d think). I’m still learn­ing the app so I’m sure there’s much more I could men­tion. Last point is about the UI. MindManager (like my Honorable men­tion app below) use a MS Office 2007 “ribbon-​like” UI. Not every­one likes this but I use Office 2007 at work and although it took me a few days to get used to it, now love it nd would never go back. MindManager’s UI is def­i­nitely the most sophis­ti­cated of all the apps I tried and it’s very unclut­tered for an app that offers so many tools at your fin­ger­tips. See it here:

http://​www​.mind​jet​.com

2– In sec­ond place for me is FreeMind… yes the free, open-​source mind map­ping app. It excels at brain­storm­ing, does an ade­quate job of for­mat­ting and it offers the most incred­i­ble and unique inter­ac­tive Flash export. It also export to a few other spe­cial for­mats like the also open-​source ToDoList appli­ca­tion. It has good Word export as well but it’s been a while since I used that so I can­not remem­ber the level of detail. Drawbacks include some rough areas due to the fact that it’s still beta soft­ware (0.8.0 is the sta­ble release, lat­est is 0.9.0 beta 12). Well worth con­sid­er­ing. See it here:

http://​free​mind​.source​forge​.net/​w​i​k​i​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​M​a​i​n​_​P​age

3– In third place for me is MindApp from Varatek soft­ware. Very inex­pen­sive at $29.95 and very good at steps 1 and 2 (brain­storm­ing and for­mat­ting). Where it fell short for me is export. Well worth down­load­ing the trial, espe­cially if you don’t fore­see need­ing very detailed export­ing into other for­mats. It was on my short list. See it here:

http://​www​.min​dapp​.com

4– In fourth place is The Brain’s PersonalBrain. A most intrigu­ing app which I really tried to like more. It may serve some­one else’s needs bet­ter. It is on the expen­sive side (not far behind MindManager) and doesn’t have nearly the same depth in the for­mat­ting depart­ment. Maybe I would have dis­cov­ered more had I spend more time with it. Great brain­storm­ing abil­i­ties and very good Web export with a data pane at the bot­tom and inter­ac­tive map at the top. See it here:

http://​www​.the​brain​.com/

Honorable men­tion goes to SmartDraw 2008. It doesn’t have as seam­less brain­storm­ing abil­i­ties as the 4 oth­ers but it still does a good job of it. It excels at the for­mat­ting aspects. It also offers a lot more than mind map­ping so, even­though that’s not its core pur­pose, it’s very good value for the money. Great for­mat­ting abil­i­ties, dis­ap­point­ing export­ing. Not exactly cheap either but I’ll keep an eye on its growth. Another point against it for me was a very clut­tered ribbon-​like UI. Much less suc­cess­ful here than MindManager. It some­times feel more like a big glo­ri­fied Microsoft Wizard than a draw­ing appli­ca­tion. It may be that it’s aimed at busi­ness peo­ple and I’m a designer used to apps like Fireworks, Illustrator, FreeHand or InDesign. Still well worth try­ing but you bet­ter be quick about it… it only offers a pity­ful 7 days trial. For an app sold at nearly $300 USD, this is rather cheap IMO. See it here:

http://​www​.smart​draw​.com/

Last topic I’d like to touch is sup­port and user com­mu­nity. Only two of the com­mer­cial apps I tried have forums: MindManager and PersonalBrain. FreeMind has a forum on SourceForge where devel­op­ers seem to be active. I’ve also tried to con­tact two com­pa­nies. One is SmartDraw which I con­tacted to express how dis­ap­point­ing I though their export­ing abil­i­ties were (for­got to com­plain about their ridicu­lous trial’s lenght). I then had a very inter­est­ing email con­ver­sa­tion with one of their sales rep over the course of 2 or 3 days… even though I was clear I would not buy their prod­uct. They seemed open and eager to get user com­ments and sug­ges­tions. Kudos to them for this.

On the other end of the spec­trum was MindApp. I wrote them with a cou­ple of pre-​sales ques­tions using a form on their site. Never heard back. To me this is unfor­giv­able, even when your prod­uct is as inex­pen­sive as theirs is.

Conclusion

I hope my com­ments in this post will help any­one look­ing to get into mind map­ping. The process of try­ing out mind map­ping apps has def­i­nitely sold me on the idea of mind map­ping itself. I find that using soft­ware to enter and orga­nize ideas and data quickly very free­ing. It also cre­ates some­thing tan­gi­ble and much more mal­leable than scrib­bles on a piece of paper. You can come back to your map, refine it, add to it and re-​export or re-​purpose it in a vari­ety of use­ful forms (den­pend­ing on the app you choose of course). It’s also a lot quicker than doing it on paper would be for me.

I love mind map­ping now even­though I’m far from being an expert and can’t wait too apply the process to other areas of both my pro­fes­sional and per­sonal lives and see how it can help me further.