Miro has the potential to change online meetups, conferences, and workshops by making a few small tweaks: having better support for slides and presentations mode.
For my workshops, I recently put all of my slides on the Miro board. I exported from powerpoint, and put 100+ images on the Miro board organised into small lectures.
What I discovered, is that as I was talking through the slides, people were adding stickies and links all around my slides. It wasn’t just me presenting, the lectures became interactive, too.
I would like to do all of my talks at meetups and conferences this way. However, the experience isn’t smooth enough yet. Some of the problems are:
- I can’t use presentation mode: I have too many slides in my workshop to make each one a frame (4 day workshop, hundreds of slides
- When people start adding notes and comments, they stop following me, so they can lose track of which slide I am on.
- I have to manually scroll between slides rather than a simple click (because I’m not using frames, see 1)
- I can’t easily hide slides that I don’t want people to see yet (I can but it would make preparing the board more time consuming and presenting less fluent)
I think these problems are super easy to solve for the smart people at miro:
- Create the concept of a slideshow/story using dedicated slide objects (don’t try and bend frames to be slides)
- Improve the presentation mode so that the active slide is highlighted in some way (if people want to go back to a previous slide or finish adding notes they can, but they can always see where the presenter is)
- Show slides that haven’t been presented yet in some type of hidden state
- Allow me to move between slides using a single button click (without making them frames)
I think this feature fits within the Miro portfolio. I’m already doing this in my workshops and it’s great to not have to switch between Miro and Powerpoint with screen sharing. It also means people have access to all of the slides and the slides themselves become a living space where people can share their notes and questions.
If anybody wants more information about this, or how I’m currently doing it, feel free to ask.