Item: Miro
Rating: 10
Author: Anna Zabolotnaya

Overall Satisfaction with Miro

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Miro for absolutely everything — running UX research and synthesising findings; agile rituals (retros, planning, discovery, shaping); content and design critique and collaboration, slides and showcases, team meetings, standups. We are a business of 5000+ people distributed all around Australia, and my personal experience with Miro started when they were still called 'RealTime board', or something along thee lines. We wouldn't be able to plan or map out anything without it.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Managing agile rituals like discoveries and shaping activities
Taking thousands of notes through the user research, clustering and synthesising
Asynchronous collaboration
Design reviews and critique

Cons

Slides management could be a bit better
The styles controls are average (e.g., no headings, titles, etc.)
Tables and mind maps are still clunky and take too much space

Return on Investment

We stopped using Zeplin for design reviews
Small low fidelity design concepts are done in situ
No need in Trello anymore, saved some time and money there
We haven't touched physical whiteboard in 5+ years
Great to have the same speed and quality of solutions for Mac and Win users

Usability

Super fast even on the largest and heaviest of the boards. Very extensive list of shortcuts and hotkeys. Intuitive, industry-appropriate UX and behaves as expected. Extra tools are hidden unless you need them. Lots of settings to make things 'yours'. Very friendly for power users.

Tool Usage

I personally use the most the ability to take thousands of notes individually in a streamlined manner; one thought per sticky note. If you're specific about your workflow and the way you record the insights, clustering and organising the notes for user research synthesis becomes super easy. I went from spending a week synthesising the insights to 1-2 days flow. Making them into slides and opening insights for comments straight away made the dev work easier as well.

Reduced Tool Overload

We don't use anything apart from the emails and messaging platforms anymore, really. Even low fidelity mock ups and wireframes are done here. Notes, documentation, presentations, everything is in Miro.

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Milanote and Microsoft Teams

We ran a business case analysis for these, and they didn't come close. Visual omnipresent collaboration is a must; list of different features is way longer in Miro; Kanban and its views is less clunky and requires less fiddling out of the box — Trello needed to be set up specifically for our needs.

Key Insights

Do you think Miro delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Miro's feature set?

Yes

Did Miro live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Miro go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Miro again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Craft, Notion

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for collaborative teams with distributed locations and schedules. Definitely need to be well organised and ready to be vigilant with documentation.

I personally don't use it much for my personal projects and hobbies, but it works beautifully in corporate environments.

Less appropriate for working with data, non-PDF documents, co-writing, collecting links (link previews are clunky). Also, search and folders are not ideal if you're not good at organising things.

Comments

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A brilliant note-taking and collaborating software for creative professionals