The Evolving Worker

I wrote a while back about common use cases for mind-mapping.

In this article I present a less common use: mind-maps can be used to create data used by database driven web applications or any other software.

Two years ago, one of my customers wanted to build an intranet to support therapists helping people to quit smoking through phone calls.

We decided to create mind maps with MindManager to describe the questions and answers, then to programmatically extract the data from those mind-maps to drive the intranet application using the Ruby programming language.

A visual example of interview scripting with mind-mapping

Here is a sample of this work (click on the image to get a bigger version):

As you may notice, we adopted specific conventions to make it easier to programmatically extract the data:

• a special icon would mark a question allowing multiple answers
• another icon would mark answers requiring free-text input
• relationships (arrows) would be used to translate the conditional flow
• comments bubble would inform the therapist of specific details

What were the benefits ?

By using a mind-mapping software to do the job, we avoided the costs of developing our own graphical user interface, which would have been significantly higher than the cost of the mind-mapping software.

Instead I wrote a surprisingly simple Ruby library to parse the MindManager maps (which are XML based) in only a few hours and used it to import the interviews data in the intranet application.

The stop-smoking specialists were able to use the mind-mapping software themselves to describe what was relevant, without much need to be trained nor without any technical person behind (as long as the adopted conventions were followed).

If you care about the technical details

If you want to know more, contact me through the website and I’ll see if I can wrap up an article on my blog for software developers.