Human Factors

All my life so far I created my mind maps by hand on butcher’s paper. A few hours ago I decided that today is the day to switch to electronic mind mapping. I remembered that Microsoft Visio comes with a mind mapping tool and I got the old PC laptop out of the closet to give it a try. But although I was able to create a primitive mind map, it didn’t look the way I wanted at all and at some stages it was quite difficult to use. Maybe I’m just too spoiled by using a Mac, but it was no pleasure to work with Visio at all.
Fortunately I remembered that James Breeze talked about an online mind mapping tool a couple of weeks ago and a bit of reasearch brought me finally to MindMeister.

The basic version is free, so I signed up and created my first master piece online. The benefits of online mind mapping are quite clear: access from every computer everywhere in the world, sharing maps with others and working on them as a group saves a lot of time and email conversations. The additional features of MindMeister are special notifications if one of those who are working with you on the same map makes some changes – you either get an email notification or a Twitter message. A proper history function brings you back to any stage in you map development you want and the automatic save keeps you from messing up by forgetting to save. Overall a really cool tool, only thing that makes it a bit difficult for me to use is my unreliable internet connection in a New Zealand suburb – but that’s not MindMaster’s fault…

Just two weeks ago Virtual Hosting created a list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs. Divided into seven different categories from Accessibility, to Web Standards, to User-Centered Design and Writing, there’s a blog for everyone interested in User Experience and a user-focussed approach. Some of my favorite reads are in there and I’m sure that I’ll add a couple of more blogs to my daily routine, once I had the time to have a closer look at the ones that are mentioned. This list seems to be something like the yellow pages of UI blogs.