Mind maps are so useful for IA work. I recently used the Mindmanager 7 Mac to run a very successful workshop with a client of mine.  The client had a limited budget and needed some objective help organising the content on her new site.

Joanna and I ran a very successful 3-hour workshop, and here’s how it went.

I started with the workshop agenda on a mind map that was projected onto the wall.  We covered:

1. Workshop purpose
2. Strategy overview

• Making money
• Differentiating
• PR
• Advertising
• Target visitor numbers
• Users
• Key tasks

1. Agree on site principles
2. Discuss/agree on initial information architecture
3. Design key site wireframe
4. Discuss technical issues
5. Actions
6. New ideas

As we went through the agenda I took notes and made changes straight onto the mind map. I was then able to email it directly to the client after the meeting.

N.B. It is important to create another ‘floating’ topic within the mind map to PARK things on and write up any ideas you or the group participants have during the session.

When we got to talking about how to organise the content on the site I created another  mind map for the information architecture and hyperlinked it to the agenda mind map.

Here’s the process we used for rapid IA creation:

1) We labelled the centre of the mind map with the site name and used a radial layout (spoke and hub) .

2) We brainstormed all the potential content that our client thought she might create for the website.

- I rapidly typed new content sub-topics onto the mind map the in a random fashion adding ALL thoughts as we went.  Each content item/thought was created as a separate sub-topic.

2) We added category subtopics (using another font/design sub-topic icon) to the map which represented sensible categories for all the information

- We moved relevant content  sub-topics onto category sub-topics as we went

3) We added the subtopics were looking complete I dragged all the content subtopics into the major categories as Joanna and the client called them out.

- We discussed and questioned each major content category to see if it made sense based on all the content within the mind map.  And we put ourselves in the users shoes to see if they would understand what each category meant. We made sure everything fitted into the categories that we had selected and we added new categories where necessary.  It’s OK they can always be deleted or undone.

4) We then had a final review of each content item, added new ones and recategorised items where relevant.

Now the client can go and validate the content categories.

You know what? From about 50 or more content topics we got it down to 6 main categories! And it took only 20 minutes! We could see it all on one screen and had the flexibility of move things around rapidly. It was much tidier than Post-it notes and used the same standard business software across the whole workshop from the agenda, to notetaking to IA.

Just to be old fashioned, we used a printable whiteboard to design the wireframes.

Happy mind mapping!