What tools do you use for Workshops & Meetings besides Miro?

  • 11 August 2020
  • 12 replies
  • 1910 views

Userlevel 4

Hey folks!
We are doing discovery to understand how can we improve Workshops & Meetings experience, and need your help! Reflecting on the workshops and/or meetings you have run, or participated in, using Miro:

  • What are the situations, or problems, that you can’t solve exclusively using Miro native tools? (E.g. I can’t run a poll in Miro.)
  • What other tools, or instruments, do you use to address the situations, or problems, you listed above? (E.g. A live polling tool like Mentimeter, etc.)

12 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

@Simon.Harris  I agree with all you’re saying… 

I’d be delighted at any point to participate in a feedback + visioning sessions ( ideally… a good representative/diverse user group is formed and a member of Miro product is present).  

@Kate Ivanova

Workshops product team - sending encouragement: 

Thanks for asking these questions. I have this vision that the workshops product team at Miro is staring at a strategy board/daunting feature backlog about how to get the video chat feature of Miro to replace zoom… and right next to it is a big list of other workshop features:

  • Presentation steps/ layers / story unfolding features / board-state frames -- like that voted number 1 in the wish list and listed above here
  • New Miro user on-boarding simplifications / protocols
    • More and simplified interactive capabilities for workshop participants
  • A suite of next level configurable polling features.
  • Video features to circumvent (zoom+miro)
    • break out rooms
    • easier meeting scheduling, invite, link management, RSVP, attendee mgnt, event check-in, passwords, auth etc.  
    • security etc. 
    • multi threaded text chat -- spatial layout of chat/chat-pinning

I hope the workshops product team hears the excitement and encouragement from Miro users that ‘if you build it they will come’. I do believe that a next level set of workshop tools are within reach and that there’s a discrete set of features that if achieved would persuade users over from the Zoom+Miro use case. 

 

Knowing what others are seeing:


+1 For better understanding of what my collaborators are seeing / their UX when I share or present. 

I think generally with any collaborative tools we the user need to know what our collaborators are seeing / experiencing when we ‘share’ or ‘collaborate’. 

 

Ask yourself: when using Miro and using a ‘collaborate’ or ‘share’ feature… how many times in a session do you ask “What are you seeing?” or “where are you?”… “what happens when I share you this link? What page does it take you to? “ … that kind of thing.   

 

Example: Any non-paying Miro user who shares a board with me has mistakenly given me view and edit privileges as a full team member.  The sharing UX for them did not clearly communicate what the UX for (me) the shared-with collaborator would be.  So. I would encourage Miro to focus on this generally, across features … helping a user know “what is the UX for those I’m collaborating with” . 


This comment applies to both the context of understanding generally another user’s journey / UX over a period of time, and also understanding at any instant in collaborative session where focus/attention is by other users.  

 

A vision for: 

live presentation+interaction involving presenters and participants. I picture a hypothetical interface: … 

Paradigm/metaphor driving this : a viewport for a user is like a camera-shuttle hovering around to different positions over the Miro board landscape below and people can be drivers or passengers of these viewport shuttles.

  • for a participant: dual view options, a) view the board as a solo driver (default) or b) as a passenger on the camera perspective of the presenter. While someone is in ‘present’ mode, different colored outlines around the full Miro window frame combined with some almost watermark-like text could indicate which view mode the user is in. They’d easily be able to jump between modes and also make their ‘driver’ view update to any given ‘presenter’ view at a particular moment- Knight Rider style… summon my shuttle to me. 
  • for a presenter the interface lets them know who is a passenger in their view --because collaborator cursor icons or collaborator viewport frames isn’t enough… as presenter, I need to trust that If I change viewport location or zoom that the participants come with me. This paradigm would mean that the feature currently called “bring X to me” would be more like “make X a passenger”  -- I can see a list of collaborator icons on the right of the presenter screen in two containers … ‘passengers’ and … ‘free roamers(?)’ and the presenter can drag icons (people) into the ‘passengers’ container, or click ‘passenger all’.  
  • controls/permissions, what a person can or can’t do to the board(comment, edit, vote, etc) would not be conflated with this viewport mode would be managed independently.

I could imagine a further manifestation of this paradigm that supports break out groups and similar socializing efforts (in high demand...~softening the virtual meeting experience).  Picturing this viewport-vessel-hopping metaphor like mingling in an art gallery … people hopping into different rooms around different points of view on different subject matter.  So I imagine the ‘join person X’s view’ as more flexible/scalable/expansive feature where anyone can jump into passenger mode on anyone else’s view(if permissions for such is granted) and this becomes the building block for break-out rooms and similar such activities.  

In branching workshops: “Now, group A goes with person X to discuss apples and group B goes with person Y to discuss oranges” … the above flex

Maybe a workshop admin grants specific ‘presenter rights’ to a subset of participants or grants the ability to all.  And that enables them to become join-able, passenger-able viewport vessels. 

The structure of the video chat and text chat could follow/reflect these viewport passenger-joins. This enables break out rooms. If you aren’t joined in a sub room you’re listening to and seeing either your personal view or listening to and seeing the main public channel/viewport - which might also be the admin/facilitator channel.

It would be nice also to enable: Links on widgets/objects in the Miro board that acts as buttons to transport people into rooms/viewports: like ‘buttons’ which say … “join Sarah’s view” or “Join room 1” “talk about _____ ” … and then those objects could be placed in the spatial flow (branching/merging) of a workshop agenda and participants could use that as doorways into particular sub events/rooms/conversations.  This could work well even outside of workshops … I picture branching returning meetings within a company.  

 

...

Polling tools

Polling tools and other tools that support participatory process similar to Liberating Structures.  

I’ve used Mentimeter to great success. 
 

 

Also Poll-Everywhere … there’s a lot of these tools out there for conferences… a critical feature is no-login unique URL particpant access to the polls and pre-queue-ing the polls and timebounding their interactability for the facilitators/admins.  The overarching workshop access should double as the poll access for anyone in the Miro-driven workshop - so no issue there. 

 

What would be great is to be able to embed polls (of various types) throughout a board. And as your workshop reaches that location in the layout/agenda the poll is ready to activate.  

Even furthermore… a workshop design team could architect a branching path ‘choose your own experience’ path… enabling participants to ‘vote with their feet’ (cursors?) and allowing workshop designers to design for emergence. The facilitator+computer assisted ‘un-conference’. 

Spinning up a proper poll dynamically, on the spot, responsive to the emerging conversation is also a prevalent need.By ‘proper’ I mean right-typed to the decision type / problem space.  This can be a treacherous moment for a facilitator… they might be at a tense moment in the conversation flow, they’ve identified a productive tension in the conversation… but now they need to thread the needle of attendee patience as they formulate the poll - both topically and logistically. And they have to go out on a limb with respect to the ‘expected flow’ of the event.  So… this interface has to be tight - easy and seamless… to produce poll and polling and polling results quickly so that the methodology and merits of the results can be accepted or appealed …  if this moment drags on or otherwise stumbles WRT process the user/facilitator risks being voted off the island… they risk losing trust as the facilitator and lose the room.  

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@Kate Ivanova -

  1. A full-featured video conferencing solution such as Zoom or WebEx. While Miro does have rudimentary capabilities, it can’t handle the volume of video collaborators, nor provide features such as breakout rooms or recording.
  2. A 3rd part dice roller - there have been hacks to do this, but it would be great to have a true add on similar to the current planning poker one
  3. PowerPoint for slide animations and other advanced features (e.g. gradient fills) which Miro can’t do natively

Kiron

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

@Kate Ivanova So far, I’ve done 12 hour training workshops (very interactive) with nothing but Miro. At this point, there’s nothing that I really need from Miro at the moment.

However, increasingly, the need for integration with Zoom is becoming more urgently, personally that is. I realised that most of my participants are running on single screens. As I do not use Zoom screensharing, the participants live in Miro 100% of the time. So they can’t see each others’ facial expressions, reactions, etc.

That’s about the only thing missing currently :)

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

@Kate Ivanova 

 

Sometimes I use a picture editing software to lighten up pictures or give more contrast to the unsplash photos.

So it would be great to have a small option of picture editing functions in the picture-tool.

When I light up a picture for instance to put text above a picture I have found a workaround that I place a grey shape on top of the picture and use the opacity function - but a picture editing with contrast or sharpen function would help, too.

Michael

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@Kate Ivanova -

I’m a project management & agile instructor and teach classes of up to 20 people usually broken up into teams of 4-5. 

For the dice roller, it is useful for many of the exercises I have in my classes, but would be a generally applicable capability, especially for folks who want to use Miro as the base platform for creating games.

Kiron

Userlevel 4

the biggest (do first please) for me is the weakness of the ‘follow-me’ for presentations - I’d like to be confident when presenting that everyone else using a board remotely is seeing the same image as I am. Since folk can scroll away (deliberately and accidentally) and the follow me link is then broken I either have to re call everyone every frame change or risk losing people

I’ll raise a big +1 for @Kiron Bondale ‘s note that embedding powerpoint slides with understand animation would be fantastic

I’d like an opened iframe to work in presentation so others see what the iframe is doing

and I’d like the equal of breakouts - perhaps a mode switch between everyone on the same frame shares AV only with others inside that frame and av is shared with the the whole community of board participants - there was a virtual event engine that did that and spatial.chat sorta does it for audio only

I’d like to be able to toggle frames visible/ outline/ invisible

I’d like the frames panel to be a collapsible hierarchicy eg Book - Chapters - Section - Content - Even better would be multiple hierarchies so I can put the same frames into more than one collapsible hierarchy Eg H1 = Steps in a process carried out by all roles and H2 = Duties by role in all steps   (or H1 = Release / sprint and H2 = UX/ Compute/ Back-end etc)

Also there are lots of things I’d guess are simple like I can’t properly manipulate text and shape size/ ration in many places (eg mid-align mindmap shapes or use all 4 sides of a mindmap shape) - these must be limits you’ve ADDED to normal editing - can you please just remove them!

In general there are LOADS of upvoted ideas and I support most of them! - I’d REALLY like you to use screen real-estate to reduce the number of clicks to do things like grab different colour pens/ highlight erase/ shapes etc when creating hand-draw figures during explanations

~~

Foot note: When I think about tools like AdobeConnectTraining there facilities like Participants can “Raise Hand / Green Check/ Red X” are useful.

So is a paged white-board I.e. a frame with ‘pages’ that I can draw on and flip forward & back - I know we have unlimited space in X-Y so its not strictly needed in Z too but a flip-chart-feel would be a useful emulation - if it could be toggled visible hidden and always appears in/over the current view not in some fixed x-y-z coords that would be great

Userlevel 4

@Kate Ivanova So far, I’ve done 12 hour training workshops (very interactive) with nothing but Miro. At this point, there’s nothing that I really need from Miro at the moment.

However, increasingly, the need for integration with Zoom is becoming more urgently, personally that is. I realised that most of my participants are running on single screens. As I do not use Zoom screensharing, the participants live in Miro 100% of the time. So they can’t see each others’ facial expressions, reactions, etc.

That’s about the only thing missing currently :)

@isman - It would be great to hear about your experiences - I assume that 12hr was 3 x 4 or 6 x 2 or some division? - Did you use zoom & miro as a matched pair 

How about we gather interest from who’d like to share stuff and set-up a time to get together? there are quiet a few other trainers here such as @Max Harper  for example 

Hey folks!
We are doing discovery to understand how can we improve Workshops & Meetings experience, and need your help! Reflecting on the workshops and/or meetings you have run, or participated in, using Miro:

  • What are the situations, or problems, that you can’t solve exclusively using Miro native tools? (E.g. I can’t run a poll in Miro.)
  • What other tools, or instruments, do you use to address the situations, or problems, you listed above? (E.g. A live polling tool like Mentimeter, etc.)

A live polling word cloud feature where we could then move the words once polling closes would be a  great tool.

 

Userlevel 1

As the moderator, I’d like to be able to make my cursor larger so that it can be more easily followed in a sea of other cursors.

Userlevel 4

Thanks @Kiron Bondale 
Want to clarify something here:
How many people do you have on the call usually?
Dice roller - do you need it for some Agile rituals? 

Userlevel 4

@Kate Ivanova -

I’m a project management & agile instructor and teach classes of up to 20 people usually broken up into teams of 4-5. 

For the dice roller, it is useful for many of the exercises I have in my classes, but would be a generally applicable capability, especially for folks who want to use Miro as the base platform for creating games.

Kiron

@Kiron Bondale 

I’d love to swap exercise notes with you!

I’ve non that use dice! but plenty of others - eg a flash-fast one is “Gimme 26 words that describes the qualities of a great PM - one per letter of the alphabet - fastest team wins - Go!” - The debrief has lots of variations :-)

Another in same vein “What resources do you need to be successful in a project? Get the first reply and “oh, I forgot to say your only allowed ideas starting with the letter S - 3mins in team with longest list wins” (Wins what? “the honour of sharing their list first”)

For me, Miro is a platform for working with docs, but not a tool for seminars and meetings.

This is true of most whiteboard tools.

My team works remotely, and Miro can't implement all the communication cases we regularly need (the same networking).

So we started to use Spatial.Chat (Zoom wasn't quite right for us): we integrate Miro documents and other collaboration tools.

When combined with collaboration and a sense of live communication (it's nice to see the faces and reactions of colleagues), remote work becomes more comfortable.

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