Design Critique: Advantages of Miro
During this quarantine period, working at home becomes a new and necessary situation. Hence tools for online teamwork have been widely used for the last several months. Miro is a popular one among all the tools. As its mission says, it is a platform to empower teams to create the next big thing. Any team who has used it before can easily notice the advantages of it for teamwork in the current situation. Based on the free plan of the website version, the strong points of it are listed below.
How to simulate the offline teamwork while online？
Working physically means every member of the team can immediately know where they are and what they are working on. Also, team members are able to comment on each other’s work and get feedback in time. It seems that it would be harder for us to keep updated on other members’ work when we work separately. To narrow the gap between these two situations, some functions of Miro are quite effective. Firstly, on the team page of Miro, we can easily see which board each member is working on, with the icon of the member shown on the row of the board. Similarly, on each board, we can also find what other members are doing in real time since all the cursors could be seen by other members. Besides, Miro has the comment function, with which it is easier for members to communicate with each other on every part of the work on the board, and people can even view the comment history including the comments that are resolved.
How to make online working organized within a team?
The boards of Miro on the screen are quite big, which meets the needs of containing a large amount of work for a team. However, people also easily encounter some troubles because of this. With so many things on one board and so many people operate together, how to keep up to date all the changes? How to find a specific thing on a board in a short time? How to make sure our own work would not be moved or operated by others by mistake? To solve the problems above, some functions work well in Miro. First of all, Miro enables every member to easily recognize what is new on the board with highlights each time they get in. After that, the thumbnail on the right bottom of the page helps to find the part we want more easily. In addition, people can choose to lock the work they have done on the board. To unlock it, others should long press it for a few seconds, which helps to avoid the mis-operation.
What is the better part of it compared with working physically?
Online working also has some advantages. Miro has wisely made use of them. Compared with offline working with white boards or papers, during which we still need to take photos and even make a digital one based on the physical outputs, working on the laptop means all the results are digital and users can easily save the work and share them with others. The nice interactions of Miro also make the online collaboration very convenient. Also, people can use the searching function to find what they want efficiently in Miro. Furthermore, a team is able to use the board to present the work to others directly with the presentation function, with the frames very easy to use.
Besides its advantages for teamwork, the abundant tools in Miro are also a reason why it is so popular, especially for designers. As design students, we would like to talk about it in our perspective, combining the usage of it with our special work contents.
Ideation
For designers, it’s quite important that they have a place to discuss their idea which plays a decisive role in the entire design. And some functions of Miro can meet this requirement of designers.
Abundant templates in Miro provide the possibility for us to collaborate more efficiently. The first reason is Miro categorizes those templates according to different design activities, such as meeting, ideation, research and so on, so that users can find the certain template they need very quickly and concisely. The second reason is that the templates have a high level of aesthetics, which means the designers do not need to put additional effort into making a better image in other websites or softwares if they will present the result.
Besides, the Miroverse (a new category in the template page) is able to inspire the users. There are many boards created and shared by other designers in that page, and users can explore how other users do teamwork through Miro in order to gain some insights they can use in their projects. If the users are the design beginners, this function provides them with an approach to get some knowledge of design tools and design methods.
Here is an example of how design students use Miro to do flowcharts together.
The purpose of this flowchart is to help us design the structure of the app. In order not to miss the main functions and pages, we decided to make the structure together, then we chose Miro as the online collaboration tool. After we used the shape tool to draw a rhombus, we can type in the rhombus directly, which is really convenient for the flowchart. In addition, flowchart template is also available, and users can choose it to make a quick and easy flowchart.
Analysis
Interaction design students like us do the product evaluation frequently, therefore, how we analyze and collate data from user tests together online is a problem that bothers us until we found Miro.
We often use post-it notes to conduct the data analysis in real life, because it allows everyone in the team to join the design activity and it helps us cluster the different data, so that the post-it function in Miro is like a tailor-made function for us.
As you can see in the figure, it is a data analysis for one of our courses. We interviewed and did a small test with several people, then we need to classify their behaviors and quotes. With Miro, we were able to do this work together and everyone can add tags on the post-it to make it easier for categorizing.
Deliver/design
In offline cooperation, we can sketch by using pen and paper, and during the discussion, we can modify the sketch whenever we want. However, under the pandemic, it became difficult. Consequently, even though Miro is not a drawing software, we use it to draw the sketch together because of its excellent online collaboration feature.
Here is an example, we use Miro to draw a part of the stroller during the online meeting. The smart drawing function in the pen tool is pretty handy that can automatically recognize your drawings and correct them to basic graphics.
What’s more, structuring posters or reports, planning scenarios of storyboard and time planning are all the possible usage of Miro.
We focus on the advantages of Miro in this article, and explain why we choose Miro as an online collaboration tool and how we use it in our design courses. In the next article, we discuss the free plan users’ experience of Miro.
Written by Peiyue Jiang & Jun Wang
