Sam Chan, Karen - Reflection on Mind Mapping Tool

Challenge & Selection

Mind mapping is the most frequent used tool in my daily operation such as working out the

marketing strategy plan or organizing events, it’s an excellent tool to categorize and

organize the ideas, it also help enhancing the memory and retention of important details

through the use of colors, images and keywords; however, it involved only me during the

creation process.

As David Kelly, the founder of IDEO said, when I want to do something analytical, I make

a list. When I’m trying to do something creative, I make a mind-map. Mind-map is a great

tool to generate more ideas, identify relationships among the different data and

information, which unleash one’s mind and encourage the flow of ideas go freely.

I have had an experience using mind-mapping tool of Design Thinking with the team to

examine our target audience’s past travel experience and brainstorm the new solutions to

solve customers’ problem.

Application

As it was a practice exercise, we only set up a small team of 5 and invited one of our

target for interview. The interview has been conducted for around 20 minutes and asked

to interviewee to share 3 travel experience (both good and bad) as well as his background.

During the process, we keep asking “so what?” to explore more in-depth answer – what’s

your problem and what you want. Then, based on the information provided by the

interviewee, we have consolidated the ideas and write on the sticky notes. One of the

teammate post the sticky note on the wall, another teammates added the notes under the

related theme and we have explored and expanded on an existing ideas, we have also

post the uncategorized notes on the wall as reference for later. Finally, we picked the

ideas which we felt feasible to transform into actual products/services.

Insights & Approach

It was a fabulous experience for me to learn different kind of design thinking tools and it

was incredible the mind mapping tool help stimulate more ideas than we imagine. It also

gave me a new way of using mind mapping to generate ideas not just outlines my own

ideas on a subject. We haven’t personalized the map, it was developed by the team, so

everyone can understand easily and able to add ideas later, at any time.

By applying mind mapping tool, we are not just think outside of the box, but think without

the box, which helped us equip with a prepared mind for Innovation – learning mindset +

broad repertoire + customer empathy.

For next time when I using mind mapping, I will pay more attention on the last step -

“Translate the insights into design criteria” which is most important in the design thinking

process. As it is mentioned “An insight statement is more than just a word”, we have

overlooked the importance and underestimated the influence of an insight statement,

which is fatal to generate comprehensive design criterion statement. Also, I would involve

more stakeholder especially the target customers in the creative intuitive process of

mind-mapping to enhance the effectiveness and lead to more creative solutions.

