Reflection-Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

I am a graphic and product designer. I work at a fintech startup. As a UX designer, I worked on a

sophisticated application in stock investing. At the first stage of the project, we spoke with

stakeholders, target users, developers and, we had a lot of meetings that had to explain our

project to them.  The explanation of a complicated application in verbal communication is not

easy. Almost every time that we represented our project, there was a lot of question from the

audience. So, I decided to create an overview of the application I am designing, showing how all

its parts work together. Because design is visualization of a solution, I decided to use mind

mapping for this challenge.

Application

First of all, I use a big board to apply all parts of the application. I put the application in the center

of the board and connect different parts of that with a line. For the primary stage of the project,

we focused on the most important parts of it, and after we got feedback from the target users,

we decided to add new features to our mind map. After I finished the poster, I took a picture of

that, and I put it on our pitch-deck.

Insight

After applying the mind mapping tool to our project, we got great feedback. We could very

easily communicate with our team, developers, key stakeholders, and especially the investors.

This caused me to use it in the next stage of the project, and I added new features to the mind

map. This result made me use other techniques of design thinking on my projects.

I learned that I should give it a try the next time in one of these situations:

1-Discover new features of the application I am working on. In this case, I can just try drawing

new connections between entities or adding more entities to the equation.

2- I want to find edge cases and to detect critical global areas.

Approach

Based on the feedback we got from all of the stakeholders, I will use this tool in my other

projects and another stage of this project. Because we could communicate easier than in past

time and spend less time to explain our project after using this tool. I think I use this tool in

some other part of the next project because this tool can use in many parts of the UX projects.

