Mind Doodle — a review
I’ve been a user of Mind Doodle for a couple of years. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of mind mapping since reading some of Tony Buzan’s books back in the early 90’s. Conceptually simple, the methods have proved powerful in helping visual learners and practitioners capture and understand potentially large volumes of information.
However, I rarely undertook the use of mind mapping at events, seminars etc, because I found that the accessibility of a paper-based image/document was highly limiting, and difficult to amend as and when new information became available.
Over the years I’ve tried a few platforms which claim to provide a user-friendly experience whilst maintaining the functionality, but none have passed muster — or rather, none which have been affordable. Enter Mind Doodle.
This Bristol-based tech company has done something which — to me — is quite remarkable. Not only have they created a mind map system which is highly affordable (free for most of the functionality) and (mostly) intuitive, but they have added a whole bunch of project-management type tools within it, and integrated with a number of other useful apps such as Slack.
Click on one of the mind map components and you’re presented with a detailed menu screen which allows you to insert notes, to chat directly with colleagues (brilliant for remote live working), add media, allocate tasks and connect one doodle to another. Yes, you can nest doodles inside one another, in principle creating a virtual universe of doodles which disappear into one another.
Many of you will be avid Slack users (other platforms are available — I’m currently evaluating ClickUp which seems pretty good). So you’ll be pleased to know that a very recent update has potentially included the ability to incorporate Mind Doodle discussions into Slack. The latest I heard this was a ‘coming soon’ project but maybe it’s made it into the final version? Anyway, it’s certainly another positive step for many potential users.
One thing that I find particularly encouraging about Mind Doodle is that they’re actually going out there and using their product in live environments. Presumably that gives them excellent feedback — good and bad — to feed into their development team. Here’s a recent example, but their blog features many more going back over the years.
Improvements
If I have one gripe about the platform, it’s that the login/menu system is not intuitive, and I have frequently found myself clicking in loops trying to find the appropriate menu for administration, or opening multiple instances of maps or teams in trying to find the correct one.
However hopefully this is something that’s also occurred to the team at Mind Doodle, and I can assure you that the other functionality far outweighs this minor grumble. I would encourage you to take the platform for a spin. If you have any questions, there is help online and the team are pretty good at getting back to you.
