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Summary: Let me edit items while they are locked and let me look and work through the a hidden frame.

 

I’love miro, but there are two huge pain points for me as facilitator who uses Miro every week with groups in online sessions.

As Facilitator, I need to be ahead of things and be able to adjust everything to the process. On the other hand, I want to make sure that my clients do not a) move around my stuff b) they can’t see whats coming next. The current features for locking objects and hiding frames is ok, but far from user friendly.

 

Locked Items: While yes, sometimes it would also be useful to lock items in a way that even I or my co-owner can’t move. The biggest issue with the current way: I usually select many items at once to lock them, but often I just need to adjust a headline or remove two placeholders but while doing so, I unlock again the hole group of locked items  - means I need to figure out again, which items to lock. Especially if I added other editable items on top, it gets a huge mess. In 99% of all cases, I’d probably be happy with just locking it down to my clients, so they don’t screw my templates. Therefore, please let me edit locked items. Either in general or let me press a key on my keyboard and ignore the lock state of any item. Another Option could be to have two layers: Everything in there is locked for everyone except the owner and co-owner.

 

Hide Frames and Items: I love the ability to hide my frames, but the current way comes with two catches: 1. The frame's headline is visible for everyone, even so it’s locked. Which sometimes discloses information ahead of time. To my opinion, hidden frames should display their label only to owner and co-owner. 2. Even more important: Please let me edit my hidden frames without showing them to everyone else on the board. Similar to locking items, in 99% of all of my cases (at least if I’m not in presentation mode), I would want to see (and edit) the content of hidden frames - I know the content anyway.  

 

Totally agree on this! To me it seems Miro have become a little blinded by the so called corporate innovation buzz, ignoring the many other use cases. 
I also use Miro for group facilitation and 1:1 workshops and there are so many features still missing for those roles...

@Matthias Jakubek it seems most of my points are at least kind of solved with the newly introduced layers feature. 
the really missing peace is now to be able to work on stuff, while others can’t see it.

Thanks for your feedback, @Christian Goebel and @Matthias Jakubek. We appreciate the insights.

Our team is reviewing this, and it is open for votes and comments. For those coming across this idea, if you feel this would be helpful for your business, please be sure to vote for it and leave a comment about your use case to help our team scope this request.

@Christian Goebel I also tried the layers recently and it’s fine to look all frames and backgrounds. however, if you want to turn on one frame after another, it quickly gets way too tedious. 


@ElvaMiro here is a more generalized use case that describes the shortcomings of Miro in its current state: 

Imagine a person in the old world preparing a meeting, workshop, coaching etc. 

That person’s job starts some time before the actual event and involves planning an itinerary and preparing the corresponding flipcharts/boards. The person might also add a few “backup”-charts that can be pulled out in case the event takes an (un)expected turn. Last but not least, the person might set up some presenter notes for him-/herself. 

So, at the start of the event, people will enter the room with a flipchart that says “welcome” and a poster showing the roadmap. From there on, our well-prepared facilitator will decide what participants get to see and when they will get to see it. The facilitator will decide on when to involve participants and when they need to just stay focused and listen. 

So, coming back to Miro, what’s really missing here is a set of facilitation tools that give control over what participants get to see vs what the board owner/facilitator sees:

  1. fully hiding singular frames (without any visible hints) 
  2. hiding elements inside a frame
  3. Nesting frames 
  4. “presenter notes” only visible to the board admin (can be placed anywhere)
  5. locking elements so they can’t be moved (ok, the layers can be useful here) 
  6. a plugin similar to sessionlab’s planning features would be easy to produce and a huge time-saver to have on hand.  

Right now, my workaround is that I have to go to another room (=board), and come back (copy/paste) with the next flipchart (frame). Not very useful. I also need to keep my presenter notes inside a different software…
 

Thank you for the detailed feedback, @Matthias Jakubek. Always appreciated. :]

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