I would love to see a simple outlining tool in Miro to enable users to organise information hierarchically.
Outlines are the text equivalent of Miro’s graphical ‘infinite canvas’, the example of this par excellence being Workflowy. They are a natural complement to mind-mapping.
An outline is simply a document composed of ‘nodes’ or bullet-points that can be infinitely nested underneath each other:
- Fruits
- Apples
- Oranges
- Vegetables
- Carrots
- Cucumbers
Step one: Create a very simple Outline tool as a Miro app. To my mind, there are just two essential components of any outlining tool: i) the ability to expand and collapse parent nodes to show or hide nodes that are nested beneath them; and ii) the ability to grab a node and drag it to a different location with the structure, so that content can be reorganised on the fly. A third, non-essential, component of most outlining tools is the ability to ‘focus’ on a particular node, zooming in to show only a particular part of the hierarchy. This is a simple and quick way of organising ideas and would have so many use cases within meetings run inside a Miro board.
Step two: once we have a simple outlining tool, the obvious next step would be to link this to Miro’s mind mapping app so that outlines can be viewed as a mind map and vice-versa. Personally, I find it far easier to create content in an outline and then simply visualise it as a mind map rather than creating the content within a mind map.
Step three: the final step after that would be to add OMPL support. OPML has long been a common file format for text organised in this way, so enabling import/export from or to OPML format would mean this simple Miro app would then act as an interface between Miro and the hundreds of other apps that use this file format, including mind-mapping apps like Mindnode or outlining apps like Workflowy or OmniOutliner.
