Design critique: To what extent should Miro consider its nonpremium experience?
In the last article, we introduced what made Miro so popular and indispensable for online collaboration and how we apply it for online design collaboration during the COVID-19 period (Learn more about Miro as a tool for design collaboration).
We already enjoy the advantages of this great tool. It doesn’t make too much sense to complain about it. However, we think when designing an application, there are some bottom lines, even for nonpremium service, the developer should take care of, such as security and privacy. The service strategy of Miro between premium and nonpremium should probably give second thoughts for several reasons below.
Confusing Account Structure
In Miro, a user may have access to multiple teams, and the team may have many boards. Although Miro gives the same permission to everyone in the team, the admin will consider him/herself as the team owner, and he or she doesn’t want to see boards irrelevant to themselves created by members. This is a conundrum. First, the members don’t have other choices to put their own board, if they don’t own their own team. Every board has to be in a team. Miro doesn’t provide private space for unpaid teams, which means every board created is visible and accessible by everyone. Miro can at least provide private space for users who don’t have to be in a team. Since there are many great templates that even bring huge value to individual users, it. It can attract more users to Miro who are not in need of collaborating with others. But now miro only allows private boards created in a team and the team has to be upgraded. Second, without upgraded accounts, team members can only edit the most recent three boards. The previous boards become View-Only. However, when the new board is created the old boards are probably still in use. If everyone creates their own boards (especially considering the situation mentioned in the first point) without asking permission from other members, the team would become a mess.
Chaotic regulation of permission
Everyone in a Miro team enjoys equal permission. For example, everyone can invite people outside the team to view and edit all the boards of the team. The owners of the boards don’t have much control over it. What owners can especially do is to delete their boards, which is a privilege, since even admin doesn’t have such capacity.
1. When a user invited to a team
When users are invited to a team, they automatically acquire permission to see and edit existing boards that were created even before they joined. They are also able to add new boards as many as they want to the team. But the problem with this mode is the board owners might feel insecure for the unacknowledged changes of the content on their boards by people who are not supposed to be in their team and Miro doesn’t provide the access of version history. So some crucial results might accidentally be changed by others and can never be retrieved.
2. When a user invited to a Miro board
When a board is shared with others outside the team, the viewer will automatically become a member of the team without being informed. They obtain full permissions such as editing the existing boards, creating new boards, etc. Not only does it impair the security of the other boards which was not intended to be shared with this new member but it is also inconvenient for the incidentally joined member. The user would lose the chance to create their own team for free if they haven’t signed up and created their own team before being invited. Worse still, even if the admin removes them, users can rejoin the team by clicking on the link of the shared board.
Premium service
Those inconveniences could mostly be addressed by upgrading. But the strategy Miro is using isn’t that wise. As shown in the table, Miro triggers users to upgrade their plan in these 4 ways.
- Little privacy for free plan users
As explained in the permission part, everyone in a Miro team enjoys equal permission and free plan users couldn’t have private boards. To own privacy, one way is not sharing, another way is to upgrade. However, letting users pay for their privacy doesn’t match people’s common sense. Many other popular remote work tools like zoom and google drive, they value people’s privacy as a baseline. So in Miro, normal users may deny paying at least 10 dollars per month mainly for private boards. Although some professional design teams may purchase the plan, they are likely to feel forced if they upgrade for ensuring security.
2. Unlimited boards
Three active boards are available for normal users and paid plan users own unlimited boards. The number of boards could probably drive people to upgrade. However, especially for students, unlimited boards are not attractive enough with this price, so we tend to use 3 boards smartly instead of upgrading.
3. Project management
With a paid plan, you can also organize the boards by creating more projects. This is of course a very useful tool with many boards in Miro. But it’s not appealing to free plan users at all. Because they only have 3 active artboards, why do they need to organize them? This strategy could even lower people’s willingness for upgrading the account.
4. “Advanced” features
Manual backup, Hi-res export, screen sharing, video chat, etc, are some other small advanced features, among which, high resolution exporting might be the only essential one for users. The other ones could easily be replaced by other free and convenient tools. For example, the video call. For normal design teams, there is no difference between having a video call in Miro or using zoom. So these features couldn’t motivate enough users to pay for them.
What is a successful design for balancing features for normal and premium users? We think there are 3 criteria: First, create a good user experience for normal users so they trust your product. Second, let normal users see the potential benefits of being a premium user. Lastly, the benefits should overcome the price. It is significantly different from forcing people to pay by designing an unpleasant free-plan experience.
From the analysis above, we don’t think the premium plan of Miro is reasonable enough. It doesn’t provide normal users with a pleasant experience: little privacy and many annoying upgrade buttons. The benefits of an upgraded plan are not attractive enough as well.
From our point of view, these issues could be addressed in these 2 directions:
To improve the experience of free plan users, Miro could make a clear distinction between the free plan and paid plan by adding icons on the premium functions. Also, Miro should either let free plan users also own private boards or kindly remind users about potential privacy issues.
To attract more users for upgrading. It might be more effective to use essential features like board amount, the board size, export file type, and file quality as upgrading advantages. For example, free plan users could only use 3 boards with limited size. There could also be more levels of premium users. For 3 more boards available, users pay for 3 dollars a month. Or charging a team based on how many active users they have.
Editing functions
As an online whiteboard collaborative platform, the editing experience in whiteboards is crucial for engaging group work. From our usage, it might be improved in these 3 aspects.
Error tolerance
We are surprised to find free plan users don’t have a trash bin. It’s an unpleasant experience if you accidentally delete a board with lots of content and find it nowhere. Miro only leaves a solution in the help center: find the board on the browser history page and restore it. As Jakob Nielsen states in the 10 heuristic evaluations, good user interface design should help users recover from errors. So we suggest Miro provide users a clear solution for the item recovery instead of letting users search in the help center.
Flexibility
There could be more flexibility in editing fonts. Some basic functions like change line spacing could be added, giving users more freedom on the whiteboard.
Intuitiveness
We also found some operations, like the selection tool, is counterintuitive. To select a graphic, users need to frame more than 50% of the graphic area. This is different from many designers’ experiences in illustrator. A better option might be to align some of these tools with popular graphic tools designers are using.
In this article, we share our opinions on why Miro should reconsider the service strategy about premium and nonpremium experiences. We also put forward some suggestions for improvements, which we hope could help designers to create pleasant remote collaboration experiences for all users during this pandemic.
