In early 2021 I was part of a team of designers and developers dubbed the “Smart Platform” to design and build “smart” widgets that can be used in varying layouts. By April 2021, my team within the Smart Platform—myself and 2 developers—shipped a simple yet powerful mind map widget. While this was an order of magnitude improvement on the free form shapes, it wasn’t enough. Our most popular mind map templates were radial mind maps—something that this new widget couldn’t do. This, coupled with the diagramming competitive landscape, we knew we had the opportunity to build something infintely more useful and completely novel.

Venngage users overwhelmingly start their designs with a template. Our usage data helped us see that our top 3 mind map templates were all radial mind maps. ~45% of unique design completions started from a radial mind map template.

Although, these templates were completely free-form—meaning that users can take any element and do as they like with it, they largely stuck with the template layout. We saw this repeatedly with user designs. They wanted to maintain the radial look and feel.

Prior research showed us that adding, modifying, or editing nodes in a mind map was an arduous task. Radial mind maps were no different. You might argue that it’s even harder owing to the difficulty in creating a radial shape.

With both qualitative and quantitative data further validating the need for an easier way to build a radial mind map, I decided to define what a radial mind map actually is. What differentiates it from a regular mind map? What are its characteristics? Its attributes?

With this particular problem, there was no reference. Competitive analysis didn’t turn up a single product that solved this problem. I had to start from scratch.

Without knowing where to start, I drew inspiration from a set of algorithms that the devs on my team had mentioned: the force-directed graph and hierarchial grouping. Both were so-called “constraint-based layout algorithms” which seemed to point in a similar direction to where we’d like to go.

My initial approach here was to start with the common actions that a user would take:

The Structured/Global quadrant ruled out the layout algorithms. So I turned to the world around me for inspiration. I noticed that when people arrange themselves in a circle they form a “track” that everyone sticks to. When someone new joins them they line themselves up on that track—maintaining the circle shape.

Once I finished shaping the project, I pitched it and then shortly after we began building. We decided to test with users during building. I couldn’t prototype a mind map that was of a high-fidelity required to get meaningful feedback.

When measuring the impact of a project in the editor, we turn to the what we call “Completion”. This looks at the percentage of designs that get completed. A completed design is when a user downloads or shares a design. A completed design is a good signal that users are happy with what they designed.

We compared the Completion of the radial mind map templates versus the Completion of free-from radial mind maps. So far we’re seeing a 7% increase in Completion.

Work is ongoing on radial mind maps. One thing in particular, is allowing users to “snap” child nodes to the track. When nodes are being dragged, users can’t see the track. This makes it difficult to tell if they're snapping on or off the track or how far from the track they're dragging the node. We also noticed that users attempt to drag nodes back to a track. “Snapping” will hopefully make this possible with little effort.

We've also begun a round of user interviews to remeasure the effort required for common mind map building tasks. We hope to see a decrease in effort across the board and gain insights to drive next steps.

This was a challenging project. One that I wasn't prepared for and didn't imagine to be working on as a Product Designer. I learned a few things along the way: