Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I would like to reflect on mind mapping. Being a product development manager, I and

team came across several challenges. One of the most used tool in such situations has been

Mind Mapping. We are into the business of manufacturing and sales of spectacle frames. One

of the key challenge faced in the development process is to provide the correct size and fit of

the frames to the customers. Here customer comes with multiple variants like, gender, age,

profession, region etc. That made it difficult for us to arrive at a proper solution with could

satisfy all the categories mentioned above. While searching for a suitable solution, we came

across design thinking and got to know about Mind Mapping, which we felt the most

appropriate tool to be used for the challenges like this.

Selection

Mind Mapping is one of the most powerful tools in the design thinker’s toolbox, to

look for patterns and insights that lead to more creative solutions to a design challenge. It

looks in to a large data and converts it into information and insights. Here in our challenge,

diversity in the population was the challenge we faced and we were looking at a large data to

analyses and crack the solution.

Application

In mind mapping we were looking for patterns and insights in a large quantity of data

that we had collected to know the current reality. Here the goal was to establish a criteria for

the what-if in the idea generation phase.  For our challenge we have decided to do it as a

campaign in our store, where we have identified customers based on their gender, age,

region, profession etc. We were looking for a group of 50 people in the store, but managed

to get 40.

We have asked these team members to go through our product in the store and try it.

They have been given with sticky notes and a pen to note down their suggestions/feedback

individually, based on fit and comfort quotient of the product. After 2 hours of exercise asked

everyone to gather in the cafeteria. Team has gone through their notes and grouped them on

the clipboard. We could able to get 9 different clusters, which were insightful.

Insight

Now come the important part of this exercise to identify the insights from each

cluster. The team has made their observations and now they need to convert their

observations to insights. For this we did so what? exercise and continued until meaningful

insights emerge. These insights include human face anatomy, spectacle frame material,

comfort adding features in the product, pupillary distance among age group etc. At this point,

this mind mapping is technically completed. The design thinking mind mapping process,

however is not complete. Here, the pivot between what is and what if, is the generation of a

design criteria statement. In this exercise we have found out the solution as the human face

anatomy, especially the nose dimension plays a pivotal role to ensure fit and comfort quotient

of the spectacle frames.

Approach

As mentioned in the beginning, mind mapping could be the right tool for this

challenge. The result what we got from this exercise has proved it and given confidence to us.

One of the alternate to this approach could be the selection of participants. Here in this

exercise we have included customers only. So it would have been better if we would have

included other stakeholders also, like sales, marketing, design, manufacturing etc. That would

have given further insights to this challenge and ideation stage would have made better.

