I have begun using Mind­Man­ager for map­ping out new web­sites and mobile apps. It is a robust tool, tho not alone at its fea­ture level. Before any of you even think of down­load­ing it for a trial run, you may want to come up with an alter ego. Here is the feed­back I left in their sat­is­fac­tion survey:

All the staff with whom I either spoke or exchanged email were polite and business-like. How­ever, all in all, my expe­ri­ence was less than fabulous.

Please under­stand that, from my per­spec­tive, I sim­ply wanted to pur­chase a piece of soft­ware. The only poten­tially dif­fi­cult thing involved in my pur­chase was the neces­sity of my pro­vid­ing your sales folk proof of my sta­tus as a non-profit user.

Instead, how­ever, of my being able to upload a scan of the nec­es­sary doc­u­ment as part of an online order which could have included the option to pur­chase the exten­sion of licensing/upgrade pre-purchase/whatever you want to call that pack­age you offer (and which I was agres­sively up-sold even though I’d have pur­chased it any­way), I was forced to field mul­ti­ple phone calls orga­niz­ing all this, even after the phone calls and follow-up meet­ing invites I rec’d — with­out hav­ing opted in for them at ALL at the time of down­load — for sim­ply test­ing the soft­ware! I would be hard-pressed to come up with any cohort of mine who *wants* that much inter­ac­tion when try­ing to buy some­thing they already know they want.

Can’t talk­ing to sales peo­ple be an option for peo­ple with ques­tions that is avoid­able for the rest of us? Fur­ther­more, when a sales per­son mis­tak­enly sends one (ME!) licenses for the wrong OS, is it truly nec­es­sary to re-charge the credit card for some­thing that was the same price either way? And to require the buyer fill out a form promis­ing “destruc­tion” of the old licenses before I can get the right license?

If it hadn’t been more has­sle that it’d have been worth to can­cel the whole thing and go with another, equally use­ful sys­tem, I would have. I cer­tainly hope that the pro­gram­mers and devel­op­ers at Mind­Jet keep the Mind­Man­ager tool honed to bleed­ing edge to make up for the sales infrastructure’s meth­ods used in mar­ket­ing it.

Nat­u­rally, I selected “no” in response to “May we con­tact you about your answers.”