Practical Miro tips and tricks
Hello folks! I’ve done a lot of remote workshops recently, made a lot of mistakes, and get a pile of learning points I want to share with you. As a base tool for that, I’ve selected Miro, because of the easiest-to-learn tool on the market and features that make you and workshop participants work more comfortably and fast.
Easy copy-paste text to stickers
Before the start one fo the workshop, I’ve been conducted dozen of hourly interviews. The topic was new for me, and each conversation was packed with useful information. So I’ve chosen to relisten and write down all insights in Notes.app just for convenience. What I’ve found was an easy way to transform a bunch of text into stickers without retyping them. You can do it three simple steps:
- Copy your raw text and paste it in Excel or Numbers.
- Copy again.
- Paste it in Miro at it will be converted into the stack of stickers
Fast sticker arranger
The things that grind ring my gears that you can arrange your stickers on a board neatly on the grid just like Make Grid… Sketch.app function. There’s the easiest way to fix this even with title, so your affinity map groups will look nice and tidy
- Create a transitional frame with the Grid option
- Select stickers you need to rearrange and move it to the transitional grid
- Fix title position if needed
- Move perfectly aligned stickers back to the origin frame.
Frame per each step and tips above
We all know that remote workshops need more preparation time than IRL analog face-to-face true old-school one. You can’t just take a pack stickers in one hand, Sharpy in another, and start your double-diamond journey at the whiteboard. I’ve found it useful to arrange frames one-by-one in the form of a workshop journey. This method will help you to see the workshop’s structure better and be a reference point for others.
Down and Lock
When you have a lot of people who are working together, sometimes they can drag the frame to the other side of the screen, move titles and descriptions. Making this mess distracts other participants.
When you’ve prepared voting dots before the stickers, the dots z-index is lower, so people can’t put the dot atop of it. To save your time and nerves fixin’ everything when people are busy with the exercise, I recommend you to lock everything that shouldn’t be touched and arrange everything that should be voted on the back.
Ice-breaker warm-up
Sometimes you have super busy participants or new clients you don’t have good relationships with, and they have no time to learn the tool that will be used for the remote workshop. I’ve found it useful to combine ice-breaking and tool introduction in one exercise. Allow them to create their first stickers and move voting dots at the ice-break activity, making the people feel comfortable making mistakes and learning new tricks.
Voting preparation
When you have several voting exercises at your workshop, it’s useful to put each of the participants on the color label and voting dots above it. In this case, you can easily copy and paste the voting block, and every participant will see the amount of dots they have.
Dealing with strange sticker bug
There’s a strange bug than allows you to add a new sticker on a board with no alignment to standard sizes. It’s something between M and L, so it’s hard to resize them automatically. So if you don’t want to fall in a situation when people use different sizes of stickers and you should continuously clean after, resize stickers before to new sticker dimensions.
All abroad and following
One of the hardest challenges during the workshop is to guide people through the board. I’ve often seen when a new participant comes into the board and starts asking, “Guys, I see only grey space with squares.” Miro has a superb feature to solve this problem. It calls Bring everyone to me. The feature will show everybody precisely the screen you see. You can trigger it via the profile picture menu. Also, you can sneak into other participant’s view via clicking to their profile pics
Not so expensive
The final argument for the tool is that it’s only $15/month and you can invite other people with editing right to work together on the board. No messing with credentials and additional charges
Plenty of other stuff to discover
I’ve tried to add the most essential things that can boost your remote workshops. There other features worth mention: timer, kanban board, adjustable toolbar, and tons of integrations. I hope you’ll find your way to love Miro. Thank you for the reading 🙃