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.”