To the drawing board

As a thought experiment, I imagined I was in charge of designing a new, better information management system. How would I organize things? What would I include? What would I change? The way we handle information is crucial for how we learn, and perhaps a better system would help people retain information and learn new things more quickly.

My design specs:

After checking out some organizational tools, I considered their key elements that could inform my own design. If I were to construct a visual information system, it would have to include these features:

Large volume of information: It's important to include the flexibility of systems like Jira and EndNote, which can handle as much information as you care to throw at them. This is the Achilles' heel of MindMeister and Comapping. I would love to see a visual information system that could somehow include tons of bookmarks and links without becoming chaotic.

Icons / graphics: The plain interface of EndNote makes me yawn...I love the punchy visuals and colorful graphics, like the ones at 37signals (see image further above).

Visual layout / structure: Long lists and endless spreadsheets tend to make information blur together, and as the paper about visual mapping (Kim, first post) demonstrates, people learn more when they can organize in a more visual way.

Collapse / expand: I was pleased to see that the mind maps allow you to expand and collapse their information. This feature is useful in Jira as well. To keep from being overwhelmed by information, it would be nice to allow users to selectively view chunks of data at a time.

My sketches:

If I were to make the ideal visual organizing system, what would it look like? Here are some different ideas I was thinking about...

I'm not planning to make a fully-functional information system, but it's useful to think about what design principles make such tools easy to use. And actually, it would be nice to incorporate some of these elements into my presentation on Wednesday, to make the information more memorable for my audience.