How do you design your Miro board for training and workshops?

  • 11 August 2020
  • 13 replies
  • 7722 views

Userlevel 5

Dear Miro community,

as we have seen in the past few months, Miro is not only the perfect tool for collaboration and ideation, but also a platform for delivering educational events, like training and workshops.

Today we'd like to open the topic of visual structure of your Miro boards. Since the space to use in Miro is unlimited, it may not come as a surprise that many of us feel unsure of how to organize our own boards to keep the structure clear and have a natural flow.

There are many things to consider:

  • the amount of the content
  • the structure of the delivery
  • the public
  • the intuitiveness of the layout

There are also many components in Miro that allow us to design a board:

  • templates
  • frames
  • shapes
  • drag-and-drops

Combining it all into an intuitive board with a good flow is no easy task, that's why now is the time to learn from each other!

We've prepared some examples that may come in handy when considering the layout of your next training or workshop:

The linear layout comes as a natural selection, since we read and write that way. The idea is to organize your content into a left-right or top-bottom order and, if needed, spread it both horizontally and vertically. This offers you a great categorization structure.

Linear layout by @Kiron Bondale 

 

Linear layout by @Kiron Bondale 

 

Cascading linear layout by @Martina Crnkovic 

Other that may come to mind are the circular layout and squared layout, which both offer a "full circle" experience by returning to the point where you first started your journey.

 

Circular layout
Circular puzzle layout

 

Squared layout
Squared layout by @Martina Crnkovic 

But, there are many others to consider: spiral layout, diamond layout, triangle layout, cascading layout etc., each with its own advantages.

Spiral layout
Diamond layout

 

Hexagon layout

We are all different, so each of us finds his/her own style and a comfortable way of working, and this is an opportunity for us to grow from each other's experience.

We shared some of our favourites and most-used cases with you in the post, and now it's your turn to shine: tell us about your layout journey - from the ideation, following with the selection of the structure, all the way to the examples - screenshots welcomed :)


13 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Great post @Martina Crnkovic - I can see a lot of Miro newcomers getting inspired by this!

Kiron

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Very cool post, @Martina Crnkovic, thanks for putting it together! In my experience, the more I try to be conscious of a layout, the more it turns out layout-less 😂 So I just tend to go with the flow these days.

A couple of examples from my recent engagements

It just went organic.
​​​​​
It just felt like it.

 

Userlevel 3
Badge +2

This is great Martina! Thanks for posting. The team at Boardle did a write up along these lines you might like— https://medium.com/boardle-io/how-to-organize-your-virtual-whiteboard-in-miro-mural-figma-or-klaxoon-e0e34f6542aa

I’ve been approaching it from a slightly different direction, trying to make a taxonomy that works for my brain with it: www.linkedin.com/pulse/miro-taxonomy-joshua-%25EC%25A1%25B0%25EC%258A%2588%25EC%2595%2584-davies 

 

Userlevel 5

@Joshua William Davies this is amazing! Can’t wait to have a deeper look into it :) Thank you for sharing.

Userlevel 5
Badge

Great and relevant conversation!  In my organization we need to turn our Leadership Development content into an online deliverable format, and that presents many challenges. I don’t expect our people to be able to sit in front of a computer all day, so our courses will need to be split into chunks and delivered over a series of days or even weeks.  So I’ve been thinking about putting all of the essential content into a learning journey map that provides the continuity between sessions.  We’ll be using Zoom with breakout rooms and for each stop on the learning journey, I plan to create a workspace for each breakout room to interact in. But I do think a map like this, if not clearly designed, could be confusing to some expect that some users might might get lost in it.  (I like the “bring everyone to my view” feature for that reason). 

So I’d like to know if there is a way to create a customized floating toolbar into which we can put our own links so that we can choose what learners can easily get to (e.g. the “home” view or other key views I would want to highlight). Can the cards feature be used in this way?

 

I love how I can lock down parts of the diagram so that participants don’t move things by mistake and just get confused about the interface.
 

 

Kind regards,

Brian

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

@Brian Fulghum In most of my boards with lots of content, I create what I call a “Workshop Table”. This is the heart of the board. Links go out to other parts of the board and there are buttons peppered all over the board to bring people back to the Workshop Table.

Links also go out to specific content on the LMS and to other boards as necessary.

A couple of examples below.

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hi @Martina Crnkovic ,

I often do workshops with a high interactivity-rate with my participants in my classes.

 

So there is at the beginning a structure - but when it comes to the interactivity some of my frames spread out because of the words of my participants:

 

 

 

 

 

So you can see: There is no rule how I bring my frames into a structure - At the end I give the structure with my frame-window:

 

Years ago I trained business people to create PowerPoint presentations just the way Nancy Duarte did - therfore I use miro often as PowerPoint presentation substitute - but it offers me more flexibility when it comes to realtime dialog with the audience or with my participants.

Michael

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Or one thing often happened:

I created a basic board for one class - after this I got an other class with the same lesson topic and i noticed:

Mh … this or that is what I need to add 

therefore it happens several times that i duplicated the last board and modified it for the other class

So this board here is a result out of this workflow:

 


As you can see the second frame was additonal added and in in the first version not there but I discovered:
“Here I have to add something to describe the process more in detail”

In the creation process I added the content only to the canvas and ordered my frames with the frame window.

Michael

Userlevel 5
Badge

 

This is a badass thread with some great screenshots and stories.

I’ll post some below, along with some guiding design / layout principle I’ve picked up over time regarding frames:

  • Keeping frame sizing consistent orthogonally ensures zoom in / zoom out queasiness is kept to a minimum when progressing sequentially in Presentation Mode (follow-up tip; pressing the play button takes you full-screen frame)
     
  • The Copy Link feature of Frames can allow you to build a hotlink index at the top of your presentation. Helpful to include a “Back to Index” link as well, that you can copy paste

  • If you set your frames at an intentional aspect ratio - letter, tabloid or legal page size - you can quickly create a PDF version for non-Miro board distribution (be sure to include a title page with a date and brandmark)

For teaching students or workshops I would like to be able to start with a very simple diagram and progressively reveal more complexity.     I’m new to Miro so I don’t quite understand what is possible.

For example, with a simple mid-map is there a way to collapse / hide all child nodes below a certain depth and then reveal them by clicking on them one new level at a time?

Or on any kind of graphic is there a way to totally hide, or at least grey out and / or blur all except an area of focus which would be still well lit and clear and in focus so I can talk about that,  still keeping it in context but without being really distracted by the context?

Thank you in advance for any solutions or ideas or wisdom or facts like “you can’t do that in Miro, try MindMeister which does that!”  etc.

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Or one thing often happened:

I created a basic board for one class - after this I got an other class with the same lesson topic and i noticed:

Mh … this or that is what I need to add 

therefore it happens several times that i duplicated the last board and modified it for the other class

So this board here is a result out of this workflow:

 


As you can see the second frame was additonal added and in in the first version not there but I discovered:
“Here I have to add something to describe the process more in detail”

In the creation process I added the content only to the canvas and ordered my frames with the frame window.

Michael

 

I totally agree with you on this @mlanders. I started out with Miro building “templates” for my programs/workshops. However, same discovery as you, I stopped going back to them. Every new session is an iteration of the older session (for similar programs and topics.) There’s so many improvements that can be made and flow that can be adjusted.

And that’s what keep it interesting and engaging as a content developer and facilitator. In-person can be slightly more rigid because of the constraint of time and format. But on platforms like Miro, man, the changes can be done in an instant with very little investment!

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

For teaching students or workshops I would like to be able to start with a very simple diagram and progressively reveal more complexity.     I’m new to Miro so I don’t quite understand what is possible.

For example, with a simple mid-map is there a way to collapse / hide all child nodes below a certain depth and then reveal them by clicking on them one new level at a time?

Or on any kind of graphic is there a way to totally hide, or at least grey out and / or blur all except an area of focus which would be still well lit and clear and in focus so I can talk about that,  still keeping it in context but without being really distracted by the context?

Thank you in advance for any solutions or ideas or wisdom or facts like “you can’t do that in Miro, try MindMeister which does that!”  etc.

Hey @Wade Schuette, I’m not exactly what tools you use for teaching or workshops so I can’t recommend the exact replacement in Miro.

However, if you create your diagrams or graphic and place them in Frames, there is the Hide/Reveal Frame feature that you can use. You can see it explained here:

https://community.miro.com/changelog-discussion-31/introducing-the-new-hide-and-reveal-setting-for-frames-2005

Useful article thanks. 

Does Miro provide the necessary “shapes” to use the “Circular Puzzle Layout” shown above?

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