Lock areas of the board that only facilitator can unlock
I recognize this would be a large system change. Here is the use case that causes me to request this feature:
I am the facilitator of a large workshop. Several participants are NOT digital natives, and yet we want them to be able participate as actively as possible.
There are some visually rich frames I wish the participants to interact with, but their interaction is limited to just a few items or types of items.
When participants are new to Miro and not digital natives, something that seems simple to us can be very difficult for them, like “please select that image and move it to the other area of the board”.
Especially if the item I want them to move is surrounded by or layered on top of other items, even when they’re locked, somehow the locked items end up getting unlocked for participants trying to figure out the tool.
I’ve had participants inadvertently unlock and delete entire frames with multiple areas, instructions, columns, etc.
I would like to be able to lock areas of the board that ONLY I can unlock as the facilitator.
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Agreeing here with what has been written and would add how important it is to keep the features simple: Just locking an area that can only be unlocked by the facilitator(s). That’s it. Do that and figure out the rest later.
I’d like to add my voice to this great collection that already exist. I use the various boards as part of various training methodologies (brainstorming, listing idea, feedback, etc.). No matter how well I lock things down, and no matter how well I instruct the activity, the participants are always grabbing things and moving them from here to there. In many cases, it completely disrupts the exercise.
I was very excited to see that yesterday there was an update for this! The new Protected Lock feature seems to allow the board owner to lock objects on the board, and an option to Protected Lock the object so that only the board owner can unlock it! I think that a more comprehensive layer system would still be a huge improvement, but this is a step in the right direction.
+1 For facilitator superpowers. Ik like Miro, but it is lagging behind as this already exists in Mural for a long time.
There is another feature which I was missing in Mural which does now exist in Mural, Private mode. This allows facilitators to enable participants to contribute without their input being exposed. In this mode you see stickies appearing without the content shown. Without it participants are influencing each other with their input. IMHO this is also a must have for Miro.
I was thinking of the most common frustrations for me in this space, and what I wish I could set permissions for, and they are as follows:
Our team is on the Miro Teams plan, and anyone that is a team member is a facilitator, so it could be that we create a new named role called “facilitator” and then assign priveliges based on that role. For our company, team member is a facilitator.
Now, these are just my preferences. What I really want is the ability to set preferences at the account or board level.
---Peter
Hi Peter, You are right. A new facilitator role is definitely needed so that you can assign such a role to some of your users specific facilitation rights. A user of your team should not always be a facilitator if your company policy needs authenticated users to use miro this will mean that everyone on the team has facilitation powers which will be very annoying.
One thing that I like about Miro is the fact that it is NOT engineered around the facilitator/participant paradigm (like Mural is). I use Miro as a collaboration tool, not a workshop tool.
But, as this thread points out, there may be a market for the facilitator/participant user scenario.
If you do make changes in that direction, PLEASE don’t compromise the existing UX. Perhaps make the UX intent of a board a board configuration (e.g. collaboration vs workshop).
Ultimately, more granular permission would be fantastic. The ability to define custom roles and assign permissions - then all of our use cases should be covered. Don’t need the extra role? Don’t define it. Need a role between facilitator and owner? Go for it! Basically, a “create your own role table” like you show in your most recent post @Peter Green.
In the short term, however, a facilitator (or superuser or whatever name fits) role that sits between editor and owner (and could be assigned to more than one person) would allow that extra level of flexibility. My specific case for right now would be allowing permission on the board for copying to be set to “facilitator/superuser” so that our facilitators can copy and paste objects between boards. Currently, granting this means I have to either hand over ownership of a board to our facilitator (which is irreversable) or give the permission to all users with edit permission.
Also giving facilitators/superusers permission to show/hide frames and unlock super-locked objects would be great.
I wonder if the feature “anyone can unlock vs only I can unlock” as a board owner, somewhat solves this wish here. It appeared somewhen this year and can only be used as a board owner. Once you locked an object you can set it to be unlockable by others (double tap ).
It’s a really nice feature @Mort, I agree. For us, though, our facilitators/trainers/workshop-leaders are often NOT the owners of the board and so this feature is not something they can use. Imagine we had an external facilitator and don’t want to hand over “ownership” of our project board to them to allow them to manage the super lock, frame hiding etc.
Now if there was a permission dropdown that says “Can Unlock Double Locked / Super Locked boards: <choose owner / facilitator (or superuser if you prefer) / editors>” so we can select who has that permission to double tap…
It’s the lack of levels of permissions that remains a challenge (at least for us).
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