Be able to turn off the automatic Connection Lines

I wish more people would vote for this item! This is my first rodeo with MIRO as I had been a MURAL user at my last two companies. At my new employer, they do not have a remote use tool, so of course I recommended Mural but my new manager found MIRO. So as a creature of habit, I want Mural back but also there are a few reasons that I am not thrilled with MIRA but this is a big one! My first workshop is coming soon and I am frustrated building the board, and I just know it’s going to frustrate others as well.  

@Yvonne Davis - thanks for the vote.  It’s only been up for a few weeks, so hopefully will garner more interest.  I’ve been using Miro for two years - and as a general rule love it.  But the line feature DRIVES ME AND MY TEAM INSANE!!!

Same here! I find it incredibly distracting. Why do they assume I need those arrows?! I rarely do, and f I do need them, I usually add them AFTER I created and clustered my stickies, not while I’m creating them. They disabled the double click to recreate the last object but make this automatic? Makes no sense for me. After over 2 years of hardcore miro usage and clear preference of miro over mural, this is actually now a point where I must admit that murals usability is superior.

This is the top complaint my entire team has with Miro too. So frustrating. My wish is either give us a check box to turn it off or just give us a regular line tool in the shapes box. This wastes so much of our time fighting against it when trying to create visual layouts for our work sessions  and project boards.

Thanks for the comment. We’ve been using Miro since the start of Covid - so two years of hard core Miro usage as well @jorosenbusch (BTW - not sure why they’ve labelled us as ‘Beginners’). 

And completely agree re the double click being removed. So annoying. 

I haven’t tried Mural - but will give it a go. 

Cheers

K

Yep. I agree with the previous comments. I have been using Miro over a year now. I despise this functionality. It causes endless problems for novices during workshops with multiple users doing collaborative work with stick notes. I recently started using Mural and noticed that this was not the norm there. I still like Miro more than Mural make this configurable. Even after using for the length i time i have it still frustrated to experience this EVERY time i use this product. Make it configurable. 

Surprising to see such a feature by default when they claim to be extra careful with features that can cause unwanted accidental actions. This is causing a lot of Ctrl-Z for me as well ! I haven’t see the real value of this feature yet. Perhaps I deal with diagrams that are too complex for such a feature...

Big part of the problem here is the bahavior of UNDO with connection lines. An immediate reaction of mine when something unwanted shows up on the screen is to hit Ctrl+Z. That works in most cases but not when you enter connection drawing mode. The new line shows up, but as it’s added yet the undo actually removes a previous operation and not the line! So you’ve just lost something you’ve done previously, while you’re still drawing the connection. And what is worse, if now you finish the connection for some reason. That change is overriden and lost forever. So annoying!

As long as I understand the point, I really dont think the focus on adding connection is fair in Miro. How often you actually do it, comparing to e.g. moving objects or editing text? Cause adding a connection is 10x easier than any of those.

Exactly. 

To you point on Undos though - although this is probably a separate post - we’ve had trouble lately with Undo not working every time you need it to. Even if you go the histroy - the action isn’t there. And this is regardless of whether it’s a line you don’t want or something else. 

Related complaints:

1. When trying to actually draw a connector line from a connection point on one shape, Miro “helpfully” changes the behavior to drawing both the connector and another shape after hovering over the blue connection point for a split second.  For a diagramming tool where mouse placement is sometimes inexact and users need that split second to place the cursor over the connection point, this behavior is terrible … at the very least, the hover timeout is too short.  Better than a hover timeout would be an explicit user action to draw the shape instead of just the connector (such as a modifier key while draggin from the connection point).
2. For shapes with a text caption below them (such as the AWS or Azure iconsets), the expected way to edit the text caption is to double-click it.  Doing this near a connection point causes a connector and shape to be drawn instead of placing an insertion point in the text to edit it.  It goes beyond nuisance to a major productivity loss, especially for folks with muscle memory from other diagramming tools.  Again, the hover-over-connection-point is far too sensitive, especially with a text caption.  (Why can’t the connection point be below the text caption, rather than superimposed on it?)

I rather feel as if Miro does not actually conduct usability testing on features they add.

Fully agree here. I can’t count the amount of times I accidentally create a connection line that I need to then delete. I wish Miro would look at usage analytics to see how many connection lines are deleted within e.g. 30 seconds of creation as a signal for how wide spread this problem is. 

I know I am not the only one in our organisation pulling their hair out because of this.

An what is worse, if you accidentally click on the connection button, you are in connection drawing mode, and e.g. Escape on the keyboard doesn’t allow you to exit the drawing mode, but  you MUST first complete the connection, then delete it.