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