I use Miro for teaching college classes and for developing video games, all facets of production.
The current state of hyperlinks is unwieldy and inelegant, and sharply limits what we can do for smooth progress through information, whether we’re instructing, demonstrating or prototyping.
Hyperlinks should work just like links work in web pages and applications:
- I know something is clickable because it changes in some way when I roll over it
- I expect that any object can be clickable
- Shapes with text can be buttons to initiate processes
- Hyperlinked objects can be set to always visible in the user frame, regardless of location (HUD, user menu, navigation bar, TOC link) for easy access to main menus and other frequently-used hubs.
Without clickable objects that behave as users expect them to (the current attached arrow tab is not standard and not intuitive as a link in current user expectations; it also looks terrible and makes presentations look unprofessional) we can’t confidently expect that a user can self-navigate through a Miro board as we intend them to.
For teaching, where I use Miro to guide students through information -- something Miro would excel at if the clickable in-board interface were better -- this is a huge issue.
For game prototyping, Miro would be an outstanding way to test and demo user paths, except that I can’t replicate our game screens and their functionality in any reasonable way.
Obstacle to resolution: click in Miro means something different than click in a webpage. One click, two results doesn’t work. Clearly an issue here is that in Miro, we click an object to edit it, which means we can’t also click an object to jump to another object. Solution: hyperlinking an object automatically locks it. If hyperlink is set, the object then locks. A long press will both unlock and give access to editing, and temporarily disable the hyperlink.
BONUS ROUND: Save to Webpage
Being able to save an existing Miro board as a webpage would be an incredible way to increase the reach and accessibility of board content. The expectation would be that all standard Miro customization would lock, and that interactivity would be limited to clicking and scrolling to navigate.
This would also be an attractive way for people with little web development experience to still be able to produce good content, similar to how Google Document content can be created and shared.
Miro could charge an extra fee for hosting, or the user could host the content themselves.
