Very good summary .Tks

Completely agree. As long as tools in Miro to support live facilitation and workshops especially with non-regular and/or non-technical users aren’t in better shape I can’t in good conscience recommend Miro to my organization over Mural.

And it pains me, because I prefer the underlying platform of Miro.

@Sebastian Schreiner  I accidentally hit best answer on your reply… I meant to just like it! It is a great reply but I am hoping for some input from the Devs

@Marina if you have the power to remove the best answer designation from Sebastian’s reply I would be grateful if you could do it!

Being selfish of my own needs as a facilitator, this is the best post so far in the forum, @Alan Heckman. Thank you for the great summary. All those are high priorities to me. Even higher than Miro-Zoom integration!

Hi @Alan Heckman 

thank you for this summary.

One element that is on the top-importance list is the login via password. Even for anonymus guest editors:

https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/password-protected-public-boards-350

It is for me one of the most necessary element - as long as it is not possible to have this I have to work in combination with other tools - like zoom or GoToMeeting without the option that guest editors can get into my board.

Michael

Amazing post, filled with care and appreciation for Miro, and at the same time, highlighting what can be done to make it more accessible and sustainable for those of us facilitating workshops! I completely agree with you about everything, and hope that the Miro folks thoroughly read the post and take your suggestions. 

Hi all,

@Alan Heckman, great topic and great questions! Thank you for starting it 

And thank you for this list of features and your own explanation of why they are important to you and your workflow. I am tagging @Kate Ivanova for workshop-related questions and the summary of features for online facilitation. Kate, please have a look.

As for the product development questions, let me check in with the team. We have a meeting this week, and I will pitch your questions there. I will get back to you as soon as I have any updates from the Product Team.

@Marina and @Kate Ivanova  Thank you so much for offering to bring this to the team and get back to us! And, please keep in mind this part: I really will like to help if there is any way I possibly can. I am sure I am not the only one!

Miro is such an amazing tool and it is ALMOST ready for the live facilitated workshop use case. It already works pretty well for long term stable teams,  small groups of participants with plenty of time for onboarding, and groups of technically competent users. Let us help you make it the best tool on the internet!

Hi everyone, Kate, product manager responsible for the Remote Workshops & Meetings product stream in Miro here.

Thank you for using Miro, and finding the time to continuously give us feedback that helps us build a better product for our users.

First off, I love your idea around hiring developers to build add-ons – we’ve seen dozens of our customers successfully build apps for their teams using Miro Platform capabilities. This is the best way to ensure the functionality that’s being added to Miro fully satisfies your requirements (which may not always be the case with features designed by the Miro team).

When I look at the list of the features you hope to see added to Miro, I obviously see some that we either have in the backlog, or are currently looking into adding to our product. That being said, I don’t feel it will be right to share any ETAs with our users at this point.

The main reason for that is the fact that since the beginning of 2020 we’ve seen a number of dramatic changes to the way the whole world operates and even now we can’t be sure what the implications of that will be. Right now we are balancing the need for our product and company to rapidly deliver solutions needed now, while also setting clear plans for the near and long term.

That being said, there are multiple ways you can have impact on our product:

• We constantly monitor Miro Community, cluster the feedback we get and make sure it informs how we prioritise features on our roadmap – so, please, keep sharing how you use our product with us
• If you’re up for it, we will be more than happy to conduct an in-depth interview to understand your workflow better and eventually give you early access to the features we design
• If you need any help with developing custom apps and integrations using Miro API, @Boris Borodyansky is always there to help and guide you
• If you’re interested in beta testing features we develop to support Remote Workshops & Meetings in Miro – please, let us know in this thread – we’ll sign you up and reach out to you once we’re ready for user testing

@Kate Ivanova -

I’d love to be added to your beta test group!

Kiron

Thank you @Kate Ivanova for that reply. I would love to do an in-depth interview if it would be helpful to you, and I would very much like to be on the beta testers list.

@Kate Ivanova - I’m also interested to beta test the next upcomming features of miro.
Michael

I have a suggestion: you guys could (should!) have a temporary guest editor link. Like, 24h available link. =)

@Alan Heckman  - a great list of things on my wish list plus a few more. Thank you for putting it together here for @Marina and the rest of us.

I have been spending lot so time building sand-boxes or play areas for newbies to learn the basics before they join my sessions (training workshops and classes). Could we form a group to share best practices on building such boards. Then, we can create a template, or the Miro team can create a template for everyone to use. I would also love a micro-course or certification where newbies can go and take. This can then be a pre-requisite before joining an event. What are your thoughts @Kate Ivanova?

@Alan Heckman - I agree all your points

I also agree the posts you pulled out for upvoting - I’ll go do that :)

So far miro is (currently) the ONLY tool with <iframe>, is one of the few to not try to harvest every customer’s contacts by insisting on a sign-up and has the best potential. But it is potential not ability as of today.

I’m finding the user interface (UI/UX) both buggy and it yields different results from the same action in different circumstances without signposting - that’s a really rookie UX error as it increases the learning curve by orders of magnitude. It also adopts some conventions that are different from ‘what we all know’ (but really means microsoft and google) which also extends onboarding

@Marina @Kate Ivanova   I’m still cogitating on my list of ‘deal-makers’ - stuff like being able to put folk into AV groups who work on a board area together - as if clustered at a flip-cart - but can look around to see whats going on elsewhere - The follow-me function needs to mature - the iframe needs to open for everyone - there is more to capture and share

I’d also like to charge for board entry eg $1 per access or 200$/mth or 100accesses for 500$ or...

I’d welcome the opportunity to chat and link up on linkedin? i’m simonharrispmp on L-In

Beta-access is also of interest

@Kate Ivanova please add me to the beta-test list as well. 

Thanks @Alan Heckman for such a great write-up. I had voted on most of them before finding your compilation. 

@Alan Heckman Great summary!

I’m adding in my thoughts on an Agenda set of features for boards.

In addition to board Owner, there could be Facilitator (assigned by owner) and then Presenter (Facilitator by default, but can be assigned by the Facilitator).

• The role of Facilitator could be assigned  to a board by the board Owner.
• The facilitator could then define an Agenda for the session (webinar, training, workshop, retrospective, etc.).
• The overall session could have a time assigned to it, e.g., 60 minutes.
• Each agenda item could have the following attributes:
  • Length of time, e.g., Icebreaker = 10 minutes.
  • Starting location (object, position, etc.) on the board.
  • Presenter for that Agenda item.
• The Facilitator would have configured the agenda in advance and with the click of a button, the session would kick off.
•  Somewhere on the screen at all times (with the ability for anyone to show/hide) would be a small, unobtrusive modal/window showing the current status of the agenda item, e.g. “Item # 2/6 - Icebreaker (4:56 remaining)”

The role of Facilitator for a board is important as it would do a number of things:

• Back to my previously stated idea, the participants could chose to turn off seeing all cursors EXCEPT for the current Presenter (being the Facilitator default)
• And, of course, if the Facilitator wants to hand over the title of Presenter to another participant, now all of the board participants will see only that user’s cursor.

Oh, and while I hope and wait for these features, I will use the boards Notes pane with checklists to keep track of the agenda.

@Rob Johnson, I like the way you have described your use case, but I don’t think it should be that limited. I would like to have the owner of the board create arbitrary permissions levels, name them,  and assign any user to any permissions level including assigning “everyone else” to a specific level.

The board owner should be able to adjust every single tool and permission for each level, so that everyone with that level assigned would have access to the tools in that level. Then it would be easy to create the facilitator and presenter permissions sets you suggested, but you could also create permissions set for “observers” or “co-facilitators” or a thousand other use cases we haven’t thought of yet. When I am sure participants in my workshops are comfortable with navigating the board and using stickies, I can add icons or arrows or whatever other tool I need to their permissions set, so they can learn to use that one next.

I completely agree! That was just all I could muster at that single point in time as I was hungry and needed to go eat haha.

Thanks @Alan Heckman and @Rob Johnson, I understand what you’re talking about and that does make sense. I would be happy to chat with you in a several weeks about possible solution 

I love this summary @Alan Heckman, thank you so much for that! @Francis Jee I love your idea about sharing best practices for onboarding! Please let me know if a group already has been formed or how I can contact you.

Hi @Marieke and @Francis Jee, great idea!

You are welcome to start such a topic in the Best Practices & Discussions section, and share your own ideas building sand-boxes / play areas for newbies! Hopefully, more people will join the discussion, and we will have a great thread with lots of brilliant ideas 

Then, we will see if we can somehow combine all the messages in a guide/template 

@Kate Ivanova I would LOVE to talk to you about this, and to help in any way I can.

Thanks for the list @Alan Heckman! 

For me, smoothing the experience for guests is a top priority. The major hurdle is the signup. Corporate execs just don’t have time for that–and anyone who insists they make time for it burns a little relationship equity with them. (As an outside consultant, I don’t really want to be the one taking that relationship hit.) 

In the pitch stage, it’s acceptable for my clients to show up as anonymous users, but that becomes a problem real quick when it’s time to collaborate in workshop mode. And even if I’ve managed to convince my direct client contact to sign up, they’re slow to ask their colleagues to do the same, especially since some will be their superiors and they don’t want to put their own relationship on the line.

I love Miro, and I’m excited to see this one figured out. (Looks like your direct competitor has an answer to this already!)   

@Kate Ivanova I’d be willing to beta test and/or talk about my use cases. 

Hey @Francis Jee I am very interesting to get your feedback on this Onboarding Video that our team has created: