The early phases of product design typically generate massive amounts of data, the result of discovery activities that included stakeholder interviews, various forms of audience, user and competitive research, and other activities. As was explored in the previous chapters, this information helps define the product, including the desired experience strategy.

The information can also be used for concept development by helping the designer "see the wood from the trees" and the technique to accomplish that is called mind mapping.

In the context of forests and trees, it is interesting to note that, similar to sketching, visualizing knowledge with diagrams has been used for centuries, dating back at least to the 3rd century CA, and is attributed to the Roman philosopher, Porphyry.

Porphyry, whose portrait you can see in the preceding image, was supposedly the first to organize information--in his case, Aristotle's Categories--in a diagram known as a Porphyry tree, examples of which are also provided in the same image. Today, there are many open source and commercial software tools for authoring and sharing mind maps, such as FreeMind, MindManager, and iMindMap.

Mind-mapping software products help organize and visualize data in compelling graphic ways, as illustrated in the preceding image. The free-form interaction makes it easy and fast to manually organize a large number of unstructured ideas, thoughts, and other bits of information and turn them into a coherent structure.

Clusters and the items nested in them can be easily named, expanded, and collapsed--items can be moved between groups, groups can be nested in other groups, and so on. The designer can quickly explore various arrangements of data and evolve the concept to a final version.

Mind-maps are significantly more effective than spreadsheets in communicating complex relationships because large amounts of data are presented to business and other stakeholders visually--initially at a high level, as a few clusters of data; the discussion progresses to details, the designer can gradually drill into each of the clusters, and discuss its composition and relationship to the rest of the structure.

Mind mapping is a domain-agnostic data-visualization technique that has endless uses. In the context of software application design, and example developing the information architecture of the application can be considered as an example.