Thinkature - Thought Organizing Tool That’s Almost There

If there is one thing that I consider the most important feature of any mindmapping tool, it would have to be a lack of friction. You must be able to take thought and put it down quickly. Whiteboards are great for this - if you have working pens - but they don’t work across the miles, which is often how I work. I thought I’d give Thinkature a try. I liked its Ajaxy-interface and ultra simplicity (there are very few tools.) The demo had me excited. It was like whiteboarding … or at least I hoped it was.

What stuck me first was how it looked like I had stumbled upon a great tool for quickly communicating what was in my mind to clients - especially early in design phases, or when we were doing landing page testing. You could rapidly create floating bubbles of information without much regard for their relationship, and then drag them together as your thoughts began to gel.

You can import graphics, so popping screen shots of landing pages into the page made it easy to refer to specific creatives and took a level of abstraction out for the clients I had for which that made sense. You can connect items with arrows very easily to show directonal flow.

But, I think the tool is suffering from its Ajaxy underpinnings. Lots of data seems to be churning in the background for rather small coordinate transformations. I have this hunch it could be optimized a great deal. After using it for twenty minutes or so I started to run into some significant weaknesses. First some observations about what I think thought organization tools are like.

• Most mind mapping tools have feature creep.They have 40 tools when 10 would have done the trick. Nobody wants to use them, so they revert back to their old way of doing things.
• Many mind mapping tools make assumptions about how you use them. The process of creating fluid maps is altered to fit weaknesses in the design, and so the entire tool suffers.
• Some mind mapping tools seem designed with paper output in mind.

So sitting here in O’hare, I thought I’d try to use this with a client to discuss a project we’re putting together. I wasn’t able to.

• You have to pause after every action so that the Ajax tools can write their data. If you get too far ahead, you can make the tool confused at best, and at worst, cause it to say it needs to reload the page - invariablly losing some of your lastest changes. This was definitely less of a problem on my T1 than on my wifi, but it got in the way of sponteniety.
• There is no UNDO. It’s so easy to delete stuff … and if you have several things selected, ouch.
• There is no “group” command. I hesitate to ask for a feature, but this one is key. You cannot group things so that they move together, and the group-select feature is really quite tough to use, especially with a trackpad on a laptop.
• As you get a longish screen of items on your page, it tends to time out and drop out more often. After a while, it took a long time to create a new item. This may have been coincidence, but it went from a minor annoyance to unusable. I was using it around 9:00 AM EST on a Thursday.
• There is no text-only/label command - you have to put all text in a box. This is okay, as you can just make big boxes that are behind other groups, but it would be nice to be able to put up a couple of lables. I’m no good at free-hand writing with my mouse.

I would urge the folks at Thinkature not to add too many features, but not to have too few either. This is a great though organizing tool that is easy to pop up on the screen. I’ve not even tried the voice feature yet, I tend to just pick up the phone or Skype to talk to folks.

I’m really hoping that this tool overcomes these hurdles, as it was one of my more positive Stumbles.

Techcrunch did an article comparing Thinkature to Conceptshare.

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