Say Hello To Systems

May 3, 2020

“Systems” is a tool for systems and design thinking. It combines a mind-map / network graph tool with a long form text editor.

As someone who tends to think visually but also likes to write out ideas into longer pieces of text I thought it would be useful to natively combine the idea of a network graph together with a text editor.

For me this tool will be useful when I’m listening to a podcast and trying to remember all of the links and references. I love mind-mapping tools but have not managed to stick to using one regularly and often just use pen and paper. But I also love writing ideas out using Nuclino or as a draft on here.

I’ve been working on the prototype for this tool for a while and I’m now at a point where I’m ready to share it with others. Yes, it was developed to scratch my own itch but I’m curious to see if other people see value in this approach as well.

The ultimate goal is for you to be able to think and put down your thoughts without the tool getting in the way.

Three Parts

This is essentially a high fidelity prototype. Without sweating the details I’ve tried to make something that can get you excited about the idea, but is realistically too rough around the edges to be used seriously.

The three key parts that glue this whole thing together.

Graph / Mind Map Mode: You can create connected nodes that form a graph network. It’s currently limited to a tree network only, but the plan is enable more types of graphs in order to be able to map complex graph networks.
Prose Mode: This is where you write about each individual node. The editor is still a bit clumsy but already supports markdown syntax.
Digest Mode: This is where you can see everything you’ve made and written in one big document. Great for reading what you wrote and sharing with others. (Still need to make this part.)

Try it out here and let me know what you think: systems.lsei.co .

Walkthough

When you start a new document you have a single node on the screen. This is the root nodes and can only have children but no siblings.

Create a new node by using the button in the UI or pressing “Enter” on the keyboard.
You can immediately start typing the name for this node.
On the right hand side of the screen you’ll see an empty text editor appear. This is where you can write longer notes about the node.
Create another node using the UI or keyboard shortcuts. “Enter” to create a child node and “Cmd + Enter” to create a sibling node.
Keep adding nodes and content until you’ve got it all out of your system.
Administer once daily.

Roadmap

What are they key features that this tool needs in order to be a solid thinking tool? A couple of my ideas so far:

Network Graph: A graph in which any entity can be connected to zero or more entities. This is closer to the reality of how systems in the real world look like.
General graph improvements: Even the current basic tidy tree graph has some quirks that need to be tidied up.
Document View: A view or “export” used to consume all the written content in one go. While you are editing the document the content of each individual node is hidden until you click on it. Bringing all the long form content together into a single document that can be saved, shared, printed, etc would be really useful to review what has been written.
Workspaces: The prototype only supports a single document. To make this actually usable it would need to support multiple documents and ideally mutliple workspaces
A working backend: A backend server to that people can register, login and store their documents outside of their browsers local storage.
Full Text Search: What’s the benefit of having something in digital form if you can’t search through it. Having a search feature for your all your documents is obviously key.

Long Term Ideas

Where could this be going in the (very uncertain) future?

Collaborate: There are plenty of cool things here the can be done to facilitate collaborative working on this. Especially useful when everyone is working remotely.
Systems Modeling: Basic systems thinking revolves around mapping the rate of change of certain parameters. Something the goes into the direction of ncase’s loopy tool would be really fun.

Collaborate

If you have any ideas for this… drop me a line. If you want to contribute, collborate, jam, even better!

#writepublishsketchpostthinkoutloud