Indi’s Mental Model Dataset Visualizer
Created by Indi Young
See the documentation for how to use this app
This is a dataset visualizer written in Javascript. With the help of Jorrit Poelen, I have created this simple browser-based interface that takes your sheet of properly* grouped and formatted data and turns it into a diagram. You can export it as an SVG or PNG file, which you can load into a drawing tool like illustrator or a collaboration tool like Mural, etc. (*format expected by the app)
Dovetail Workarounds
Created by Kyle Bowen and Kristi Leach
Kyle: Dovetail does have templating, but there are limitations. I got on a call with them about a year ago to explain in detail where I saw the product not really working for this use case, and they basically agreed that the summarizing process wasn’t a good fit for the way Dovetail works. There are workarounds. For example, you could treat summaries as atomic “insights” in Dovetail parlance, but that approach kind of gives much more weight to summaries.
Kristi: I wonder if it might work well to do the whole tower as an insight page, with each summary listed as a section on the page. Maybe the summary could be a heading with the quote as a paragraph under it, for example?
Kyle: I think it might depend on the scale/scope of the purpose in question? It would be interesting to see how that approach would work for larger projects.
Mural and Miro
Mural: TBA Indi has been trying to convince Jim Kalbach at Mural to let us give them code to read spreadsheets and lay out native objects (rectangles, instead of stickies) based on the data in the spreadsheet, according to our mental model diagram “skyline” format. Currently, if you use Indi’s visualizer app (above) to create an SVG, you and paste that SVG into Mural and layer information below and on top of it. So it works for the long run. But not for the iterations of creating the skyline in the first place.
Miro: This is the opposite of how we usually work, but … check out Mappl.io, which lets you convert stickies to tables and then export to CSV.
Qlik Sense for visualizing nested dimensions
Created by Murray Grigo-McMahon
Murray Grigo-McMahon has created an extension based on Mental Model Diagrams that creates visualisations whenever you need to show nested dimensions.
Tableau: Example using the dog mental model
Created by Guillermo Ermel
Guillermo Ermel pulled the data into Tableau and made the diagram from there. Very cool.
OmniGraffle: Using OmniOutliner to Create Your MMD
Created by Voltaire Santos Miran
Set up columns for your data by using the “add column” feature on the toolbar. You can create one Outliner document for each interview. Here is Voltaire’s combing file template (2Kb zip file).
Coda.io
Created by Kyle Bowen
Kyle: I rely pretty heavily on Coda.io for problem-spacey projects. On the surface, Coda looks like a doc solution, but it does some pretty amazing stuff with databases.