Reflection – Mind Mapping and the process of UX environments

Juan Romero

Challenge

Many tools of the design thinking process are used to understand human behavior in UX (User  Experience) environments. The most used tool to communicate fast and with effectiveness is  the Mind Mapping Tool, because it can be the perfect communication bridge between the  users, designers and engineers. I use this approach often with the co-working groups to  achieve a channel where everyone can understand the what, where, how, when and why of  any project. In all stages of the project we bring users to understand the procedures, by  making a broad board which can represent the user from any part of the mind mapping in all  of its stages. By applying this methodology, we can assure that customers are more likely to  understand the communication process between the company and the final user, were  upgrades and future tools can be implemented progressively to endure the learning curve of  the users with the interfaces we design and develop.

Application

We start the mind mapping by bringing concepts based on ethnographic and documentary  research, in which we seek for functionality and the needs and wishes from all stakeholders.  Then, by applying a hierarchic tree of concepts, we can prioritize the sequences from “most  needed” to “less needed”. This is a crucial process for the project, because from all of the  users, we can establish who of them are more likely to use the product, and what constraints  can we apply to ensure the maximum efficiency on the usability process.

To begin with the Mind Mapping, we gather all the team in a debate to talk about the project.  By dividing all the stake holders (users, clients and team work) in aleatory groups of 3 to 4  participants with a main moderator, we apply times of 10 minutes for each debate process  with a total of 4 hours of the activity itself. Every 10 minutes, each group will have to rotate  randomly based on a card hanging at his neck, which will supply all the 24 random stations to  ensure that no participant will repeat with the same group of people. Each 10 minutes will  have a questionnaire in which every person in the group have to fill up.

At the end of the session, each participant may have a total of 24 questionnaires were all the  information will be digitize and organized. With the co-working teams, we will make the mind  mapping of the UX project based on the answers (needs, wishes, suggestions and assumptions)  of each participant and the correlations of those with the company needs of the project.

After the whole process, the final result will be a full mind mapping tool, between lines,  photos, sticky notes and texts, were both users and team work can fully understand to achieve  the maximum approach to start developing ideas for the UX product.

Insight & Approach

What we always learn of this exercise of the mind mapping–hierarchy tool is that in a pre- design stage of a project we can bring all stake holders into one only environment to squeeze  all the problems, needs, wishes, assumptions, considerations and suggestions to gain all the  information we can get for understanding better the user needs before making any both  design and engineering decision.

We have to understand that not every users mind is the same, and we need as much both  empathy and emotional information to achieve projects that can be obtained from real users,  instead of fictional stories.

At the end, the gap closes a bit more between companies and users, and we can react towards  a better product, achieving not only economic incomes, but also happiness for those who  purchase our products.

