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Are the mind maps an interesting tool for students to take notes? Are they helping understanding? The experiment is to ask second-year undergraduate students to listen to a radio show and take notes in different formats: on computer, on paper, linearly or in the form of mind maps. To check if the format is helpful, we measure the level of understanding of students for each format through a questionnaire. We do not really observe any difference in terms of understanding. However, a great variability is observed in achieving mind maps, which leads us to develop the qualitative analysis of the experiment and propose mind maps categorizations: about the type of subject, the level of depth of direction taken in the design: nature of the audio document, development of a participant by name or position, of the event, the type of speech and the topic discussed. In addition to show the inter-individual variability of mind maps, this study shows the complementarity of the two methods: qualitative and quantitative.