9 Tips for Collaborating Virtually
Miro Superuser shares his digital best practices for empowering everyone to share ideas.
As a designer in the innovation space, I live for the back-of-the-napkin-type of brainstorming. Colorful sticky notes and whiteboard sketches thrill me.
My name is Gavin Pham and I am an Experience Designer at Salesforce. My team leverages a design-led approach to co-create Salesforce solutions with our customers, ultimately arriving at highly effective outcomes that delight the end-user. My work walks the line between visionary and practical and requires frequent collaboration.
In my previous design roles, my colleagues and I would have intense brainstorming sessions in cramped studio spaces with wall-to-wall whiteboards. But now, on any given day I might work with people spanning four or more time zones. Even before COVID, I was using Miro to collaborate with my teams across Salesforce. It’s a tool that has allowed me to work with people all over the world in unprecedented ways.
Using Miro is comparable to drawing on a whiteboard or moving sticky notes across a wall. It’s a workspace with a bit more structure than the back of a napkin, but without the polished feeling of an interactive wireframe. It’s easy, accessible, and scales infinitely. You’ll never run out of space for another sticky note. It’s also great for folks who might not want to use more high-fidelity design tools.
I like the idea of virtual whiteboarding in general, but I LOVE the way that Miro has executed it. I’m what some may call a Miro superuser and I’m going to share my tried-and-true tips for getting started. After you read this story, you’ll be brainstorming, synthesizing information, and collaborating with your teams in new and exciting ways. I’m even going to share my secret sauce for getting clients and executives excited about collaborating in Miro.
How to get started:
Miro is excellent for intense team collaboration. For teams with a lot of internal trust, it can be a great “brain-dump” area where we can add all kinds of notes from interviews, research, stakeholder themes, meeting notes, and even slides from different decks. This scrappy approach works best for small teams of around 4–5 because it can get very hectic, very quickly.
- Get the desktop app.
If you’re working on a large board, Miro can eat a lot of resources (specifically RAM, which you’ll notice when using the browser app). Luckily the technical requirements to run the program aren’t very high, but it’s certainly a better experience if you try to minimize the amount of resources your computer might be consuming. - Don’t reinvent the wheel.
There are a ton of neat plugins and templates in Miro and on the Miroverse that you can use and gain inspiration from. Strategic frameworks, such as a Gantt chart or a 2x2 matrix, are only a few clicks away. For me, the built-in kanbans and Google plugins for slide decks and spreadsheets are some of my most-used features. Salesforce even published a template of their own! If you’ve ever wanted to host a V2MOM workshop in style, why not in Miro?
How to get your team involved:
I will own that I’m highly tech-literate and have been privileged to work on digital tools for most of my life. Not everyone is quite as comfortable collaborating in virtual space, and it can be hard to adjust in this new era of forced digital everything. This has made me a lot more conscious of how I’m building an on-ramp for people who are getting used to the tool. I mentioned before that Miro has a lot of functionality, I try to make most setups as simple and organized as possible for accessibility purposes.
- Stick to the basics.
Miro has a lot of functionality and can do some awesome things if you want to dive down rabbit holes. But it takes time to get used to and internalize how the tool works. To keep it simple, make a frame, make a sticky note, and maybe some shapes and arrows. That’s going to cover at least 80% of what you need at the entry-level.
- Legibility is important.
I have pretty bad eyesight so certain colors of sticky notes are nearly impossible for me to read. Sticky notes that have higher contrast colors meet WCAG AA or even AAA standards (as a background color to a black font). But not all of them do. I will stand on my soapbox to declare war on the dark blue and dark purple sticky notes. Most people I work with use Miro on a 15” laptop, so I try to keep related material close together at a reasonable zoom level for content to be read without changing the viewport.
- Keep it clean-ish.
Like any workspace, if it’s a jumble of colors and shapes with illegible text, it will be hard to communicate your ideas to your teammates. Miro has a lot of built-in functionality (auto-alignment, pre-set sticky note sizes, line snapping, item locking) that makes it easy to stay organized. I like to ask myself “If I were new to this board, would I be able to wayfind without any assistance? Would this information make sense to me without additional explanation?” Answering these questions helps me to set up Miro boards that are navigable, legible, and purposeful.
How to use Miro like a pro:
Here are a few tips for helping newcomers get set up and collaborating with everyone from designers to executives.
- Have your go-to frames.
I have a handful of Miro frames that I keep on hand in case I need to introduce the tool to a new user or re-use it in a workshop. Frames act like pages that group objects together, similar to a single slide on a slide deck. All the content inside the frame moves and is copied together with the frame. You can change the frame color, ratio, and name. An example of a frame I use often is a stylized template of a “Parking Lot” for when we need to park questions and comments for a later date. All I need to do is copy the frame and paste it into my new workspace.
- Programs and plugins are your friends.
You can add an entire PDF, link out to any website, or even embed spreadsheets that will dynamically update. It’s astonishing how many different programs have plugins or easy embeds. As a researcher myself, I love to embed slide decks and spreadsheets in a single Miro board to share and annotate with my coworkers. I’ve even started toying around with the Jira plugin to work through more ambiguous stories with my developer colleagues. - Great for gathering feedback.
Miro is a phenomenal tool for gathering user feedback. If you have screenshots or images of a design that you’re thinking about moving forward with, it’s really easy to throw it in Miro and ask for feedback in context to specific areas on the page with sticky notes, drawings, or arrows. Not many other design tools allow for that level of flexibility, which I’ve found to really level the playing field. - Co-create with customers.
Typically, I go into a client presentation with a slide deck, but I’ve found clients love it when I bring them into a Miro board instead. They like getting into the creativity with us, throwing spaghetti at the walls, as we call it. They are in there with us adding sticky notes and sharing ideas. And we come away with some new ideas and inspiration. I’ve seen some incredible workshop boards from other colleagues at Salesforce; with a little bit of elbow grease, you can really make using Miro into an engaging experience. Check out this case study for some inspiration on how to drive client engagement in Miro.
A Quick Case Study:
Learn how my colleagues Ellie Brain, Jasmine Barksdale, Megan Colgan Wiggins, and Maddie Kate Currie designed a Miro experience for a client.
What was it? An interactive design research readout with an art exhibit themed approach. Our goal was to create something that felt like the participants were part of the experience, rather than just sitting through another presentation.
What was Miro’s role? Miro provided the virtual space to create the experience for end-users, as well as a place for them to provide feedback and input. The team was able to effortlessly transition users from “room” to “room” by navigating across the Miro board and collected their feedback by prompting them to add their own stickies in real-time, right into our exhibit.
How’d we do it? For an experience of this magnitude (over 140 attendees were invited to a 3.5-hour readout), “reinventing the wheel” was not an option. Our team leveraged pre-made templates, programs, and plug-ins to speed up board creation.
What was the outcome? At the end of the experience, the team launched a survey to gather feedback from participants around the event. The vast majority of responses indicated a positive experience with the facilitation in Miro. One participant shared, “I loved using Miro to architect the next iteration [of our business].” Ultimately, we were able to increase awareness, buy-in, and momentum around our proposed solutions.
Design work doesn’t happen without collaboration. Opening these collaborative spaces to a variety of voices is how we find the best solutions. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert at working in a virtual space or if you’ve never made a sticky before, your ideas matter.
If you’re excited to learn more about collaboration, check out these other articles by the Salesforce Design team:
Designers Need to Move People and Pixels
Relationships, like products, need to be designed
Get the most out of stakeholder collaboration — and maximize your research impact
How Salesforce Accelerates Design Productivity and Collaboration
Thank you to Ellie Brain, Jasmine Barksdale, Megan Colgan Wiggins, and Maddie Kate Currie for sharing your amazing work. What you’ve been able to accomplish in the tool is truly remarkable! Huge shoutout to Margaret Seelie and Madeline Davis from Salesforce Design for assisting with the production of this article. Y’all are the best!
Learn more about Salesforce Design at www.salesforce.com/design.
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