Miro Review

Miro is pretty much my team's research and planning repository. I use Miro for all kinds of things: facilitating participatory activities with stakeholders and research participants in remote workshops (which are the bulk of our workshops), as a visual aid/"sketching" tool for personal and team research planning and strategizing, and as a repository for research findings (both for literature reviews and primary research with end users). The main use case here is conducting activities that one might conduct on paper or a whiteboard (e.g. the messy work of participatory design activities, ideation, and brainstorming) with remotely-located participants and/or (less often) in-person when wanting to keep the outputs immediately documented.

This is the core of its value-add for me...I work with (and have worked with) teams located in multiple cities or across the country. Without Miro, we'd be trying to diagram and do activities in Google Slides or Powerpoint presentations, or writing over one another in shared documents...using largely words. The whole spatial aspect and visual aspect to communication that is a crucial part of design would be compromised. Miro supports visual communication, and the nature of the workspaces actually lets us even work on things asynchronously (an advantage over in-person collaboration onsite) by contributing to a board in our own time.