Recently a wonderful friend and fellow designer turned me onto the idea of mind mapping, and through some of his posts on the process and software he definitely had me ready to buy MindManager 8 (btw he’s also got me sold on Axure, so somebody ought to be paying him for this by now). If you check his site, he has a comparison of various mindmapping tools including some free and lower priced options. MindManager is $350, so why would I pay for it rather than using free, open-source tools? This strikes me as a good example of differentiation through user experience, so let me share a bit of my thought process, based on the assumption that I have already decided to use some mindmapping software (as to my thoughts and reasons why, that’s another entry, but for now, you can just assume I have a good reason).
1. All the options have similar functionality, and many have equal feature sets. In short, most of them will do the things I need. That said, I work alone and as an amateur, so the functions they all have meet my needs now, even if I’d like to use some higher end stuff later on a professional basis. If this was all that mattered, I would’ve chosen the free one immediately.
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