Yesterday I attended a webinar put together by VizThink regarding a concept called Idea Mapping. The speaker, Jamie Nast, brought the group through several exercises and stories about Idea Mapping, what it is, and how to use it. The webinar was really great and I’m so glad that I attended!
A quick background. Idea mapping is an exercise that deals with a well defined goal (one example might be “document to do list”) from which a person stems different ideas or topics and from them subtopics, etc. Jamie can, of course, explain this much better, but the idea is to go where your brain is going, document your ideas in the order they come to you (not just chronological order), and come up with as many relative ideas as possible. When are you done? You’ll know when you are done. A side note is that I created a quick idea map for this post :-).
I started to think about how useful an idea map is to visualize ideas. Think about when you are brainstorming and requirements gathering. How great would it be to put this in a map of some sorts so that you can easily learn and remember the details, and also visually show people a “map” of what is required or what is wanted.
I also started to think about how this map could lead into further user experience documentation. I got further insight into this when I saw a colleague present an experience map which basically took all the ideas the team had and flushed them out into experiences that a user would take, and documented these experiences in a swim lane like format.
Alot of thoughts and information, and I am excited to dive into them further and explore them more. What are your thoughts/ideas around this topic? What other insights might I be overlooking?
Oh and if you get a chance look up VizThink as well as Jamie. You won’t be sorry you did!
UX
User Experience
VizThink
Idea Mapping
Elisabeth,
Thank you so much for attending the webinar last week. I am very excited that you got so much out of just a 90-minute session. If you have any examples that you can share (non-proprietary), I would love to feature you on my blog and website and link back to your blog in the text. If you are willing, send me a jpg of your idea map and a description…but no pressure.
I’ll go ahead and answer Ray’s question about the difference between idea mapping and mind mapping. You’re right – not much. However, mind mapping is legislated but what’s called “The Laws of Mind Mapping”. Over the years many if not most of my clients were frustrated with feeling boxed in by what was supposed to be something that enhanced creativity.
One of the most frustrating examples is that by definition in a truly pure mind map you can only have one single word per branch. In the real business world this doesn’t work. There are many times when the purpose of the map requires multiple words per branch as well as a clearly defined central topic — which also requires multiple words sometimes. Granted we want to keep it to as few words as possible, but the one-word-law needs to go.
This is one of the differences…fyi.
Glad you liked it! It was a great webinar. Jackie speaks on the difference in her talk and it is a pretty slight difference that I don’t remember to be honest. This was my first detailed learning of either, so I went with the term Idea Mapping obviously.
Great post Lis. I’d love to see the idea map you came up with for the post. I missed the webinar but plan on downloading it when it’s available. I’m curious about the difference between an idea map and a mind map. Are they one and the same?