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It supports the traditional use cases associated with mind mapping, such as project management (Michelle Matus, product marketing manager at MindMeister, told Built In last month that she creates a distinct map for each new feature launch), presentation mode (users can turn branches and topics into slides) and collaborative brainstorming (multiple users can edit the same file).īut the software is maybe most noteworthy for offering a task management app, called MeisterTask.
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MindMeister has a long track record, dating back to 2007. Who should try it? Users who need to transition from mind maps to lean development. Below we dive into 14 noteworthy mind-mapping software options and what kind of user might find each worth a try.Ī launch meeting diagrammed in a MindMeister mind map.
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“They shouldn’t be!” At the same time, as Robertson discovered, free options sometimes have limited functionality. “Even if I was a business, no employee of mine is doing $24 a month worth of mind mapping,” Robertson said. Commercial options require subscriptions beyond a small number of free editable documents, so pricing may seem costly for moderate, individual users. Robertson has struggled to find an ideal fit for his situation.
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For example, he finds most software manuals wanting, so he’ll make individual maps to diagram how features interact with one another. He uses mind maps to chart out concepts that have a lot of interconnected parts. Grant Robertson is a semi-retired, self-employed Austin-based network manager. For instance: Do you need it for personal work or teamwork? Do you need to port maps into other frameworks, like Kanban? Do you need a tool that can create other diagrams beyond mind maps? And, of course, what are the pricing considerations? Mind mapping has borne fruit for information architecture in UX design, project and people management, organization charting and more.īut ironically, juggling all the considerations when choosing mind-mapping software might feel like anything but streamlined and orderly. But in time, that same hub-and-spoke-style layout proved useful in charting relationships for a number of business use cases. The technique emerged primarily as a way to organize notes into a more cogent structure - both hierarchical and radial - than outlines allow. A mind map example put together in XMind to illustrate the concept. | Image: Screenshot It does so by visually connecting a central idea to its various subtopics and then connecting related items within those subtopics. The note-taking and information-diagramming technique offers a way to organize and logically link together the many various stray threads related to a given topic. If you had to identify the crux of mind mapping in a single phrase, it might be: order from chaos.
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