Practical Miro tips and tricks

Oleksandr Valius
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readMay 25, 2020

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Picture of Joan Miró on the header

HHello 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.

Animation of dog making rail when train is moving
This is how usually remote workshop looks like when you haven’t prepared well

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:

  1. Copy your raw text and paste it in Excel or Numbers.
  2. Copy again.
  3. Paste it in Miro at it will be converted into the stack of stickers
Animation of how to transform text to stickers
Miro always paste where your cursor is

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

  1. Create a transitional frame with the Grid option
  2. Select stickers you need to rearrange and move it to the transitional grid
  3. Fix title position if needed
  4. Move perfectly aligned stickers back to the origin frame.
Animation about quick stickers rearrangement
You are free to rename your transitional frame to the coolest name you’ve come.

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.

Row of frames with names and numbers
You can also add some task description, timing and everything else you want above the frame

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.

Shortcuts to locking and rearranging of elements
Look once and learn shortcuts forever

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.

Ice-breaking exercise template

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.

Voting block template

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.

Example of resizing stickers right
On the left the stickers on S-size, on the right the synced 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

Menu of calling Bring everyone to me option

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 🙃

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