Investigating Mind-Mapping as a Tool for Problem Exploration in Early Design

We present an experiment to study the role of mind-mapping as a tool for design opportunity identification and problem understanding. Our goal is to investigate how the quality of design opportunity statements change with two different techniques, namely, mind-mapping and free writing. Identifying design opportunities is an important step in new product development and little is currently understood in terms of what tools can provide cognitive support for problem clarification. In this work, we focus on mind-mapping as one example of a potential tool for providing such support. Mind-maps are well-known for their ability to enable the exploration of ideas in an unconstrained and structured way. To study their role in helping problem exploration, we conducted a between-subject user study with 28 participants to investigate how information structure and organization affect the exploration of ideas in a given design context. Further, we propose new evaluation metrics to quantitatively assess key elements presented in the design opportunity statements generated after exploring the problem domain. We report on the quantitative results, the exploration behaviors, and the general user feedback about the experience. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings on design problem identification and future digital mind-mapping tools for exploratory tasks.