NovaMind User Interface and feature set - NMDev

[Developer comment]

User interface
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When we introduced NovaMind 3 with the tabbed interface, we had about half our customers who loved it and about half who hated it - it caused a bit of a rift, and although we improved it in various ways over time, we kept getting feedback from some users that it was not "Mac-like".

We were interested when in January this year, Microsoft showed a pre-release version of Office in which they had implemented the ribbon bar concepts that they use in Office 2007 for Windows. My understanding of the feedback they received is that the Mac users told them in no uncertain terms that that concept did not fit with the Mac user experience, so Microsoft went back to the drawing board to update the interface. At the same time we were already well on the way with our own user interface design.

In designing the new user interface, we used the following sources of inspiration:
- Apple's i-apps
- Keynote and Pages
- Omni applications
- Winners of Apple Design Awards, such as Comic Life
and the user feedback during development and testing to refine the user interface.

As with any major change in an application like this which is in wide distribution, we have had a lot of feedback following the release, and approximately 98% of this feedback has been positive.

We are therefore very happy with the response from the market.

Feature set and Editions
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So why did we decide to product three different products at different price points and with different feature sets?

As Guy Kawasaki says, if you try to create a single product that will please everyone, you will end up with something that is bland, confusing, and will not fully satisfy any portion of your market completely.

Obviously with a Mind Mapping product, we have a very diverse user base, from primary students, to teachers, lecturers, tertiary students, business analists, project managers, business owners, creative thinkers, writers, screenwriters, presenters and many others. The number of different uses to which people put NovaMind has astounded us.

In order to best cater to the different markets, we have created three different applications with different feature sets to cater to the differing needs of the different user groups.

All three editions of NovaMind 4 have a number of brand new features such as templates, themes, map styles, graphic styles etc.

NovaMind Express is designed to be a very affordable ($49) entry level product which provides excellent Mind Mapping capabilities for primary and secondary school students, classrooms, and for beginning Mind Mappers.

NovaMind Pro ($149) is designed as a very powerfull Mind Mapping application for secondary and tertiary students, business professionals etc, and has many capabilities that are not available in the Express version, like hyperlinks, multiple Mind Maps in a single document, checkboxes etc. It also has other brand new features like the document view which makes it much easier to manipulate the map settings for multiple Mind Maps at once.

NovaMind Platinum ($249) is designed to be the ultimate Mind Mapping application for power Mind Mappers, people who need to make powerful presentations, screenwriters, project planners, business consultants, serious business people, and the people who need the absolute best.

Platinum comes with the NovaMind Presenter - a powerful presentation feature that allows you to glide over your Mind Map, zoom into the points of interest, and give complete, highly professional presentations from within NovaMind.

The screenwriting module will be completely rewritten to take into account the many feature requests of our screenwriter users - note that the initial version of 4.0 will have the current screenwriting capabilities, and the new screenwriter will be added a little later on. Part of the reason for this is that some of the functionality we are building for the Mac version requires MacOS X 10.5.

There are extensive features for adding task related information to your Mind Map, and reporting on the information that is there. You can add your own custom information to branches.

All of these features are either brand new or extensively updated from the old versions.

In order to effectively cater for the different markets with the new products, we needed to look at the different user groups and make sure that the right set of features was included in each edition. None of the new products is a direct upgrade from a previous product. For instance if you were to compare NovaMind 3 to NovaMind 4 pro, you would see that while there are many new features, in version 4 such as the templates, themes, map styles, graphics styles, new user interface, draggable palettes etc, there are also some things that were not appropriate to have in a product aimed at that audience.

This is especially true of features where we wanted to produce specialist features that were best of breed, like the rewritten screenwriting system, and the rewritten task information recording and the new task reporting and custom attributes on branches. It was not appropriate to put these in the Pro product because of the target audience, and also because of the economics of producing it for that size market, so it needed to go in the Platinum version.

So to summarize, the new products are new products, not just a simple upgrade from the previous version of the same product. Sure, they build on the foundation of NovaMind 3, but we needed to put the extra work in now to build 3 new products in order to better provide for the needs of our different user groups.

I hope this clarifies the versions, the user interface, and directions. If you want further information, please visit our web site www.nova-mind.com and contact our sales or support staff as appropriate.

Gideon King
CEO, NovaMind Software

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Monday, July 23 2007 @ 07:38 PM PDT