I’m a new Miro user. I have the Consultant plan and will use Miro to do brainstorming with sticky notes with my clients. I’ll use the Miro tool for approx 2.5 hours to complete 3 short brainstorming exercises with each client (typically a group of 7 - 10 people). A few questions:
How do I invite those people to access the boards I created? Note: That group will not access the board again. I’ll then use the same board (after erasing content from client #1 with client #2 later that day or the next.
Should I have one board with the three sections or three boards each with its own template?
Am I supposed to create a “Team” for each client?
Thank you for your assistance.
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@Lance Sedlak You can invite them as Guest Editors. Use a Password (if enabled) and share the link with your clients.
Hi @Lance Sedlak and welcome to Miro!
A heads up: I wont’ be answering your questions in the exact (a/b/c) order. There’s just so much to cover!
How do I invite those people to access the boards I created?
The scenario you have outlined sounds like a good fit for Miro’s Guest Editor mode. In a board’s Share settings, you can turn on Anyone with the linkCan edit. A few quick notes on this:
As the settings indicates, “Anyone with the link”, it is a publicly accessible link, i.e., a Miro account is not required, which has left may users concerned about the wrong person gaining access. After this feedback, Miro has started rolling out the option to password protect a publicly shared link. If you don’t have this on your account yet, just hold on and it should show up soon- Miro will also be letting everyone know once it has been full rolled out. In the meantime, you should still feel confident using the Guest Editor feature as long as you send your clients the board link via a secure method and explicitly let them know NOT to share it with anyone else on a publicly accessible forum, e.g., a public Facebook post. I have it on my account - here’s what I see:
If your clients do not have a Miro account and use the link you shared with them, when they access the board, you won’t see their name beside their cursor. Instead, you will see something like Guest Editor, Guest Artisan, Guest Researcher, etc. If your clients DO have a Miro account and are signed in, you should see whatever name they have used when they set up their Miro account.
Am I supposed to create a "Team" for each client?
If you decide to go with Guest Editor access for your clients, there will be no need to create “teams”.
Should I have one board with the three sections or three boards each with its own template? Unless you are a concerned with the participants being too distracted by having three sections in one board, then I would advise against this approach as
the ability to have multiple objects/frame/sections/etc. in one board is what makes Miro so powerful!
the less boards, the less boards for
you to manage creating templates in, copying, enabling sharing on, etc.
your clients to move between
Custom Templates - you mentioned, “I’ll then use the same board (after erasing content from client #1 with client #2 later that day or the next.”
There will be no need for this. With Custom Templates, you can create the board with as much generic content as you’d like, then select all of the content (a Ctrl + A or Shift + click-and-drag) and the select the option to Save as template. Then you could create new boards for each client and select your newly created template and you’ll have a fresh start. Once you have completed your session, you could even export a copy of the board for your client and then file the board into a client specific Project.
Getting your clients familiar with Miro before the session
While your use case of 10-12 people just creating a few stickies sounds simple, given the wide range of users with varying virtual/UI-based navigation savviness, I would strongly suggest that you develop a Miro learning/onboarding strategy. This could be as simple as, “Hey folks, please click this link and spend ten minutes to get familiar with the tool.”.
The link you send could be to a simple board that you have created that has things like
the Visual Notes pane pinned open with some instructions and a checklist of things to do - or you can just add some stickies at the top of a board with the instructions (and be sure to set the board’s Start view).
You could embed a short YouTube video on navigation in Miro - check our Miro’s YouTube videos.
Add a frame with instructions of “Create three stickies and drag them here”.
You may also want to check out the Miro Academy, not only for client ideas, but yourself as well.
Have any more questions? Fire away! There’s a great lot of experienced users on this forum who are always willing to help out.
Here’s a summary of the links above, including a few others
Isman - Thank you for the reply. I don’t seem to have password enabled yet but this seems to be the method for getting them access.
Rob - This is excellent information. Thank you for taking the time to provide all of the detail. I will take your advice and send out some pre-work to get each group familiar with Miro. I will also create a short exercise for them to set the stage for the specific brainstorming process.
I do have an additional question: While doing brainstorming with sticky notes, the board will be visible and I’ll have 10 people all creating the notes in parallel and placing them on the board. How do you recommend handling the sizing of the board view to ensure people can see each of the notes while not placing them on top of each other as they generate their ideas? We typically get 12 - 15 ideas per person x 10 people. So we’ll have 120+ notes posted.
@Lance Sedlak You’re welcome!
Your additional question right way remind me of a recent post started by @Jenny Mullane, titled Board Design Best Practices - this is definitely worth a browse. As @Isman Tanuri commented in that post, I also agree that it is good practice for the newcomers to start adding items in the board while at 100% zoom - this can been done quite quickly by clicking the zoom percentage in the bottom-right corner of the board, which will jump to 100%:
As for the sticky note size, I’d suggest sticking with small, which should be the default when at 100%.
As for multiple participants creating multiple stickies at one time, there are just so many ways to do this,b but I will try to slow my brain down and focus on one option that, while it may cause a bit more set up work for you, it surely be a more clear process and hopefully a better experience for for your client, not to mention more efficient use of everyone’s time.
You could
Create a Frame for each user to enter their stickies - e.g., Rob’s stickies.
Once you are all on the board, they can quickly find the frame by searching (click in search box at top-right or Ctrl + F) or clicking on the Frames side pane at the bottom left corner.
They can create their stickies in their station.
You (or they) can move them over to a main frame once done.
You could even create a landing spot on the page (setting the board’s start view) and create an object that links them to the frame where they should create their stickies. To get the link to an object (e.g., the frame), select the object and in the three-dot menu, select Copy link. Then, on another object’s menu, select Link to.
Before I show you this in action, a few tips/options on creating multiple stickies:
Click the sticky note icon in the board’s left, vertical menu pane.
Just press the N key on the keyboard.
Creating a sticky and pressing the Tab key when done typing will create a new sticky right beside the old sticky.
There is a sticky Bulk mode, access using the sticky note icon the board’s left, vertical menu pane.
Here is all is in action (I’ll use the bulk mode):
Rob - you are awesome. Thank you for taking the time to reply with such great information. Impressive. As I’m a newbie, I’m a bit intimidated and also just learning Miro. It’s quite obvious you know what you are doing. I’ve been thinking about some other uses of Miro. Do you do any template creation work?
@Lance Sedlak I have created a few templates for my teams internal solution design & creation process. They are quite similar to the default ones in Miro, only tweaked to closer match our processes and terminology.
If you haven't already, check our Miroverse. It's a collection of templates and Miro use cases created by Miro users.
Rob - Thank you for the reply and ongoing dialogue . I'm getting more comfortable using Miro and may utilize elements of other templates on Miroverse. Still so much to explore and learn.
