Mural

Comments: At work, I'm known as the sticky note queen. I always have so many thoughts swirling through my head and need a place to keep them, so I've historically used sticky notes. But sticky notes can only get me so far - they literally don't always stick around, I only have room for so many, my work space feels incredibly cluttered because of them , and there's no easy way to show a relationship between/ amongst the thoughts they represent. I love mural because it's a collective dumping of thoughts onto an online platform. I can create processes, show relationships between thoughts, collect others' thoughts, and organize it all together. It's the sticky note brainstorming tool of the future.

Pros: I love that Mural lets me choose the size of my virtual sticky note, adjust the color, and add text to it, because this helps me organize my thoughts and categorize things as I see fit. I feel I have creative control of how I want to organize my thoughts. I also love the options to use shapes and lines to organize thoughts within a larger framework, which takes the sticky note concept a step further. I also really like the voting mechanism - people can vote on ideas (on sticky notes) and are given a certain amount of votes. Other people can't see these votes until voting has ended, which is a great way to reduce bias and have everyone looking at and choosing from the same ideas. As an organization with lots of remote workers, we use Mural often to collaborate in brainstorming on an online platform. It's our go-to.

Cons: The best way to share with specific people seems to be to send them a link, but in terms of sharing for a wide audience, It's not always straightforward to export the mural itself into a report or another document. I usually have to take a screenshot, which can't always capture everything going on within the mural in question because you have to zoom out so much to capture everything.

Comments: This tool achieves many problems and is suitable for everyday use, personal use, small groups, and large working groups. Personal Use: visual organization and planning Small Groups: can quickly move ideas into visual representations that make it very easy to share with other people. MURAL's often become the foundation for projects which people come back to time and time again. It is very satisfying to collaborate with colleagues in this way as much of the applications we use day to day are only design for single users. Workshops: MURAL is powerful when put in the hands of a facillitator who can then guide a group of people through experiential learning and discussions which lead to emergent thinking and non-intuitive insights. Visual Documentation: Over the years I have become very proficient as a visual note taker in mural and can listen to speaker or meeting proceed and capture the meeting in a visually engaging way.

Pros: Mural is hands down the most versatile visual communication tool available today. What I love the most is that I can use the tool every day and that its easy enough for most people to get the hang of within a few minutes, allowing anyone to interact in high fidelity.

Cons: The one thing I don't like about Mural is that some people aren't pro users—I wish everyone were =) Also wish that MURALs could be a first class object in GSuite's Drive =)

Comments: So far the experience has been smooth and rewarding, You don't need to travel to brainstorm ideas quickly with your remote teams or planning​ a project with teams in multiple locations.

Pros: Gone are are the days when you have to be co-located to run a workshop or collaborate with remote product teams, you can now think and collaborate visually anywhere anytime. I love how it mimics the real world experience of brainstorming, project planning or synthesizing the data, a lot of data. It does it all in real time without the needs of the team to be co-located. If you are new to design thinking, they already have the readily available template which can be used to run a workshop or just brainstorm the ideas. It works better on laptops/desktops but the best on touchscreen​ devices. A dream setup would be giant touch screens in all the locations.

Cons: Downloading the date for offline use takes time, It sends download link on registered email id. Time taken for that email to hit your inbox is not consistent, sometimes you get it within seconds and sometimes it takes minutes.

Comments: I've been able to grow with mural and explore new worlds of collaboration ... both enhancing face to face workshops and enabling remote collaborators to have equal voices. Support from the mural team to help us explore new ways to effectively collaborate (not just use their software) have been compelling.

Pros: I really appreciate how easy it is to dive in and get started with little complexity or knowledge. Drop some stickies on an empty whiteboard and you're off ... or play with templates, voting, and other advanced features to drive amazing new collaborations that are only possible in the digital world.

Cons: In the past, I have disliked the lack of feature parity between web and mobile versions. That has recently improved.

Comments: MURAL brings the whiteboard and the design studio wall online so that I can collaborate with clients and colleagues around the world. Now my entire workflow is in a digital medium, so I can a lot of efficiency that way.

Pros: I love that I can send anyone a link to a MURAL board and within 5 minutes they're totally comfortable using it. Yet beyond its simple on-boarding experience is a lot of flexibility that supports a wide variety of use cases.

Cons: There are some small interaction details reduce elegance: I'm not crazy about how its arrows/lines connect to notes/shapes. And it's hard to have a consistent typographic hierarchy, because text scales with shapes, and there's no other way to control type size.