Mind Map Software for Support Managers: Test the Export Before You Buy

The best mind map software for a support manager is whichever program gets a map out of itself and in front of people who don’t have it installed. Colours, icons and clever auto-layout come second, because a map only does its job if the team can still read it after the meeting ends.

I covered how to draw one in Mind Map a Problem Before You Try to Solve It. This post answers the question that follows: free or paid, and what to check in a half-hour trial before you spend anything.

What should mind map software actually do for a support team?

Four things, and only four.

1. Let you add a branch without breaking your train of thought.
2. Let you move branches around when the real structure shows up halfway through.
3. Get the finished map out in a form other people can open.
4. Print legibly.

The University of Nottingham’s mind map guide tells you to try to use one key word per line, so a tool that turns every node into a paragraph is working against the technique. Notice that three of the four are about what happens after the map exists. Most product pages spend their space on the first one. That’s why I’d run the tests below in the order of what goes wrong in real teams: sharing first, drawing speed last.

Can a colleague open the map without the software?

Build a map with about 40 branches, which is what a real incident review produces. Export it, send it to someone who has never seen the program, and ask them to read it and tell you the three branches you’d act on first. If they can’t open the file, you’ve learned the most important thing about the tool in five minutes.

Formats matter more than features here. A picture or a web page opens on any desktop. The program’s own file opens only where the program lives, so a team with one licence ends up with one person who can read the maps.

FreeMind is a useful yardstick because it’s free and its project wiki is plain about what it does. It’s open-source software released under the GNU GPL, it’s written in Java, and it stores maps in XML. It can export a map to a web page with folding branches. The wiki also says viewing a FreeMind map in a browser needs Java 1.4 installed. That’s exactly the sort of detail to check against a locked-down corporate desktop, where your reader may not have Java at all.

Whichever tool you try, repeat the test with the most restricted machine your readers use. If the answer is “they’d need to install something”, add that to the price.

Does the map survive a Word document and a printer?

Most maps end up in an incident review pack, a project plan or an email to someone senior. Copy the exported picture into a Word document and print it on one page.

Then hold the page at arm’s length. If you can’t read the second-level branches, the map fails, however nice it looked on screen. A 40-branch map needs a tool that lets you control font size and the spacing between branches, or one that breaks a large map across pages cleanly. Check this before you fall in love with a layout.

This is also where paid packages sometimes earn their money, but only if they pass the test. Ask the salesperson to show you a printed page, not a screen. The same discipline applies when you buy any software, and I wrote about it in Help Desk Software Trial: Test the SLA Clock Before You Buy: decide what you’ll test before the demo starts, so the demo can’t decide for you.

Is it faster than paper for a live conversation?

Time yourself. Take the five-minute exercise from my earlier post, where a first pass at a problem like “tickets going stale” produces four main branches and about twelve details. Do it once on paper and once in the software, with a colleague talking while you capture.

If the software is slower, don’t fight it. Use paper or a whiteboard for the workshop, and key the result into the tool afterwards for filing and sharing. The beginner’s guide to mind maps makes the same point: the drawing isn’t the value, the ideas going down quickly are.

When is a paid licence worth it?

Only when it passes all three tests and the free option doesn’t. That’s a narrower case than the marketing suggests. For a manager who draws a few maps a month, a free tool that exports a picture and a web page is enough. For a team that builds a map for every major incident and attaches it to the review, a paid package that pastes cleanly into Word and PowerPoint can pay back in the time saved reformatting.

Count seats carefully. Multiply the licence by the number of people who will edit maps, not read them. Readers should never need a seat, and if they do, the tool failed the first test.

One habit costs nothing in any tool: save the exported page next to the ticket or the project record the day you draw the map. In a year, the map is often the only record of why you made the change.