Tailor your Miro app to your users’ needs with custom actions

Many people know Miro as a visual workspace for innovation where teams can easily aggregate information from across disparate tools and content sources to build the next big thing. The Miro Developer Platform is an extension of that mission, where developers and partners can build apps and integrations for our 60+ million users. In this post, learn about custom actions, which developers can add to their privately distributed apps to help Miro users make the most out of them.

How do custom actions help Miro users?

Reviewing our customer wish list, we know that more than 30% of Miro users want to find ways to reduce repetitive tasks on Miro. This includes minimizing typing and mouse clicks, which can save them time.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the experimental release of a new feature for privately distributed Miro apps: custom actions. With custom actions, you can add simple actions to your app that are accessible from the context menu of a board item. This way, you can extend the power of your apps even more, while empowering users to streamline their workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and much more.

Custom action being toggled from the context menu for a board item

How do custom actions help app developers?

For developers, custom actions help your app users discover relevant functionality via the context menu. By adding more capabilities to your apps, you’ll meet more users’ needs. In turn, they’ll leave with a more positive experience.

For instance, perhaps you want to enable your users to interact with third-party content via custom actions.

Here are a few use cases:

• Video: Perhaps your end users include UX researchers who want to take notes from a user research session. You can build a custom action that will download transcripts of video recordings onto a Miro board.
• Documents: Perhaps your end users participate in regular brainstorming sessions. You can build a custom action app that will allow them to take notes in their doc right in Miro, so they don’t have to switch tabs.
• Surveys: Maybe your team has held a recent Ask Me Anything Q&A session. You can build a custom action that will allow them to export the questions as Miro Cards and tag individuals to answer them by a specific date.
• App cards: Your teams may have workflows that you may want to trigger based on the status of the app card. You can support it with a custom action to have the workflow triggered each time someone updates the card with a predicate defined on the specific status.
• Images: You can build a custom action to remove backgrounds from images provided by specific providers using the providers url in the predicate.
• Stickies & cards: You may want to group the stickies and cards created in a brainstorming session by who created them. You can define a custom action on multiple widgets (stickies and cards, in this case) to group them by the creator.

To build your first custom action, check out our developer documentation.

At this time, custom actions are only supported for non-public apps that will be distributed privately via a shareable authorization link from your App Settings page. This means that apps built with custom actions will not be eligible for distribution via the Miro Marketplace, and cannot be widely and publicly distributed. However, we’re working on extending this feature to public apps in the future. Feel free to follow our Changelog for further developments. Of course, even if you only have a public app, feel free to build a custom action and share feedback so we can keep it in mind when the time comes.

Let us know what you think

Just as we learned our users wanted an easy way to get smaller tasks done with their apps, there may be other features you want to request, either as a Miro user or a developer. So let us know.

The Miro Developer Platform provides many ways for you to interact and communicate with our team and other developers. We have an online community, an active Discord server, and we regularly speak at events where we can hear directly what’s on your mind. As this is still an experimental feature, be sure to reach out in the #experimental channel on Discord.

It’s really important to us that we can create the best possible developer experience when it comes to this new capability, so please share any and all of your feedback with us.

Also, if you haven’t built a Miro app yet, it’s easy to get started. You can build a full-stack app with Miro’s Web SDK for a frontend experience, and Miro’s REST API for authorization and backend actions.

Get started today.