Item: Mural
Rating: 9
Author: Steve Bassette

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Several of our teams used MURAL to help us planning and organize our work in our sprints and plan our roadmaps. Planning and organization tools like Jira are too process oriented with too many distracting features to be very usable so we shifted to white boarding tools. At our peak usage, we used MURAL pretty intensely to collaborate in synchronous meetings, asynchronous plannings, and design. Ultimately, we replaced it with a more cost efficient option, but overall I found it a great tool.

Pros and Cons

It is Lightweight and Stays out of the way
It feels informal like a white board
It easy to use
Adding consistent sticky notes is easier than others
It is easy to change sticky note shapes
No embedded data to accidentally lose
The Inking works well
Linking within boards is really smooth

Frames cannot be nested
It was easy to move notes while panning
Lines sometimes go crazy
It is sometimes laggy (especially when working with Indian teams)

Most Important Features

Lightweight
Accessibility
Easy

Return on Investment

Improved planning throughput
Reduced communication costs
Increased conversation
Increased topic understanding

Alternatives Considered

Miro, Lucidspark and FigJam

I like it better than Miro because MURAL's more informal feel makes it encourage conversation and use. Miro also let's you bury too much information "inside" the notes making it really easy to lose sight of important data. I like MURAL better than Lucidspark because of how fast the pages load, especially links within the board. Any app is better than Microsoft whiteboard which is appalling unusable and feature incomplete.

Key Insights

Do you think Mural delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mural's feature set?

Yes

Did Mural live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Mural go as expected?

Would you buy Mural again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I've recommended MURAL to a lot of people in a lot of fields. This is a great tool for any group of people that might stand around a white board if they were in person. Even if they are in person, I still recommend it pretty often because, unlike a white board, MURAL is virtual, so it can go offline with you. I've recommended it to other Software Teams, individual software developers, engineering teams, Sales Managers, Office Staff, Manufacturing teams, and more.

Usability

Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from
most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a
graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

A great whiteboarding software for any team in any industry

Overall Satisfaction with MURAL