Reflection : Mind Mapping

Challenge  I work for a small company that’s looking to launch a new product/service to really make a  difference. The goal is to keep more teens and young adults informed on day to day news,  events, movements and changes happening in the world. This is crucial as these youngsters  are the future and their decisions and thoughts matter immensely. They need to be more  involved and aware to make the right decisions and sustain future generations.

Selection  I decided that mind mapping would be a great tool to help my co-workers and I explore our  ideas and come up with solutions to this problem. A mind map is a diagram used to visually  organise information. It shows the relationship amongst different pieces of the whole.  Individual mind maps are converted by accommodation. This could help organise the  group’s ideas in a manner that best represents each persons views and shows how they’re  linked and to what.

Application  The process begins by exploring the current situation, or ‘what is'. We conduct extensive  research on how much our target audience knows about what is going on in the world right  now and how they came to know of it. We figure out what interests them and what drives  them to research different topics. Most importantly, we separate them into age categories  ranging from 13 to 25 and speak with these different groups personally and really engage  with them and figure out what could help each group more.

This is followed by sharing the data we’ve obtained with everyone involved and each of us  drawing a mind map of our proposed solutions or what we think would work best. Related  ideas are connected with simple lines and everything flows logically. For example someone  might say 13 to 15 year olds are more visually inclined and often on their phones. This  implies their source would have to include graphics and big letters and be digital and hassle  free. They might propose an app or a website without necessarily requiring log in as that  saves time.

These individual mind maps are then shared with the group to get an idea of how each  individual is thinking. From this, co creation happens. People with similar (not same) ideas  can try and make a single mind map to incorporate their thoughts and differences best. This  process repeats till we have one final mind map which is a best fit of every individuals  thoughts and ideas. The ideas which don’t make it to the final mind map are saved for later  trials.

Insight  From using the tool of mind mapping, everyone’s thoughts became clearer. We were able to  make sense of why a person thought something was fitting and were also able to

accommodate differences. The final mind map helped us bring our project to life including  bits of everyone’s ideas based off the initial research. There were a lot of new approaches  which resulted from everyone making their individual mind maps first. For example, instead  of just an app, having uniquely chosen notifications alone (perhaps from a website without  needing too much information) would be a good idea based on the target group’s interests.

Approach  Mind mapping seemed to be the perfect tool in our case and helped us come up with several  smart solutions to implement. It satisfied our requirements.   Another way to approach the problem would be to use visualisation to look at our target  group as different personalities and use that as the basis of finding our solutions  individually. Different people might visualise different personalities and hence different  solutions from which our final personalities arise, similar to the example in week 3.

In our next step we would include the tool learning launch to see how our product, which is  the result of our final mind map, performs. We would try it out on our sample groups and  see the responses and engagement and compare it to previously collected data. If there is an  improvement, we’re ready to officially release the product. Else, we return to the mind  mapping stage and try out other ideas and iterate till the goal is reached.

