Miro’s Mind Map feature/template was a great next step in making mind mapping easier to do in Miro. The next step: Making them even more useful.
Mind Maps are great for generating ideas, e.g., Gojko Adzic's Impact Mapping technique. Once you have those ideas in your Miro Mind Map, the next logical step is usually to take those ideas and evolve them outside of the Mind Map context - vote, prioritize, build, etc.
The Idea
For Mind Map nodes to exist and evolve outside of the context of the Mind Map. Here is one scenario that I am envisioning:
The user could select any node (central/root, parent, child, etc.) and choose to Convert to <sticky note or Card]. That node and all subsequent nodes would be converted to the desired object.
The user could then take those new objects and continue to work with them.
All node/connector line colors would also carry over.
With a development background (from many years ago), as I continue to run scenarios through my mind as to the implementation of something like this. Perhaps this would start as: Copy as >sticky notes or Cards]?
If the mind map nodes were converted to an existing object (sticky/Card), I suppose it would be a lot of work to make existing objects fit into the context of the Mind Map framework. Ideally, though, you could swap the Mind Map nodes for any single object type.
imho miro’s opportunity to strengthen is the UI. Removing the exception rule-set that complicates the grammar of “what can this object do?” would speed-up adoption time
As built learning to be productive requires the user to have a knowledge of many context specific facilities and behaviours - mostly in the form of a limitation - like mindmap nodes are left-right aligned by developer imposed constraint -
If they are stripped out then @Rob Johnson Your idea above would be more easily implemented if any onboard object could be formatted and populated with any attribute.
IMHO the semantics of and graphical representation of an item and the underlying storage of attributes should be bound by the user at time of use not by the developer at time of writing code.
So make every onboard node capable of storing & showing or not all attributes - Title/ Text-fields/ Date-Fields/ Links/ Assignments/ etc - internally a sparse linked list would be easy to use to hold whats added - give fields default names but let the user rename, give a collection of fields and formats an assignable name so i can create my own “Sprint-Demo” or “Test Task” or “MindMap-Leaf” objects
and
make any onboard ‘node’ capable of being rendered as any shape/ colour/ connections/ fonts/ alignments etc
Then the idea above and 99% of the other tool/ technique specific needs would be met by a simpler UI
Ciao :)
@Kate Ivanova what do you think?
I would also like to have mindmaps allow different kinds of media, stickies, text boxes, lists, etc. currently only text, and always centered.
Text in Mind-map cells is always centered; No numbering or bulleting, just text
Text in Shapes can be justified and aligned horizontally and vertically; but do not allow bullets or numbers.
Text in text boxes can be aligned at bulletted/ numbered/ indented.
@Brian Fulghum - A not-so-obvious feature in mind maps is that you can add bulleted/numbered lists by starting with “- “ or “1. “ and then using Shift + Enter to go to the next line.
@Brian Fulghum - A not-so-obvious feature in mind maps is that you can add bulleted/numbered lists by starting with “- “ or “1. “ and then using Shift + Enter to go to the next line.
Thanks, @Robert Johnson . I discovered that starting with an asterisk also creates a bullet, as in MS Word. But what about making the text justify left? (or right) do you know of a way to do that? Word keyboard shortcuts aren’t useful here.
Hi guys,
I have developed a plugin, which accomplishes the above mention suggestion by @Robert Johnson to some extent. Link to Community post about the said plugin :- Cardsy - Miro Community Post
Everyone: if you haven't heard of Yash's Cardy plugin until now and want to quickly turn mind map nodes nodes into cards, well now you HAVE to try it out!
Hey all, I’ve been working on an app to help convert mindmaps to shapes. You can see my progress through a twitter video here - And if it will help you, please let me know!
I use mindmaps because they make it easy to add new nodes while everything else adjusts, but when I present them I prefer them as shapes so I can control fontsize, colour, etc. - so they’re easier to understand at a glance.
Yash’s Cardsy plugin above is a great tool as well, but the Miro SDK doesn’t provide any information about the hierarchy of nodes, which makes it difficult to lay cards and shapes out appropriately. I’m trying to solve that so the conversion can maintain the right layout.
Oh, here’s a screenshot
I would love this feature. In my particular use case, we’re using mindmaps to populate a whole tree of ideas, then we would like to take the bottom level of the tree, copy/paste, then convert to sticky notes or cards (or even basic shapes potentially) to move/organize/elaborate on the ideas. If Miro turns into another Confluence where I have to download plugins for every little thing like this I’ll be super sad. This feels like a nice base functionality to have.
Thanks for the suggestion of Cardsy, but it doesn’t really work as suggested here. It converts things to cards, sure. However, the original requests and ideas imply >>keeping the original structure and links<< . When applying Cardsy to a mind map, I get a pile of unconnected cards.
I’m back to original wondering: why use Mindmap at all?!?! Too many restrictions.
