Mural

Deze tool is echt geweldig. Tijdens de corona pandemie waren we in staat om goede brainstorms te organiseren op afstand. Iedereen in het team dacht dat dit niet kon, maar het tegendeel is bewezen. Iedereen kan post-its plakken, je kunt onafhankelijk van elkaar voten etc. Ik raad iedereen deze tool aan die een goede brainstorm wilt organiseren op afstand.

Het nadeel aan Mural vind ik de user management. Soms zijn er meerdere teamleden ingelogd op hetzelfde account, waardoor je voor elkaar gaat stemmen. Ik zou het fijn vinden als er een signaal werd afgegeven dat er al iemand is ingelogd op het account. Dat ontbreekt nu.

Mural is the thing you don't think you need and resist paying for or trying because you just don't need one more digital tool in your life and workflow. Until you experience it and realize you were so wrong. It's the one tool you actually can't live without. The concept is simple: a free space to create with a simple range of options (mostly text boxes and post-it notes). Think of it like a digital whiteboard. Then try to imagine life and meetings without a physical whiteboard. Exactly.

The range of options for what you can add to a Mural is somewhat limited, but that's a key part of its success. Having too many options would be paralyzing. Once you master the basic controls and options, the sky is the limit for what you can do. Lots of templates are available to help you get started or inspire you with what others have done and the Mural team is always offering support and webinars to help you explore the tool more deeply. One thing that has frustrated new users is getting the hang of controls especially if you are using on a computer (mouse vs trackpad controls are a bit different). But that is easily solved if you can get over your initial discomfort and commit to learning something new.

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.

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.