Written by: Janine Loo
You heard it here first: July is the month of big, exciting updates for our favourite digital tools! A few weeks ago, Figma announced some of its latest feature releases (see our full breakdown here), and just yesterday, Miro launched a whole new batch of updates to its software – and boy, are we excited!
At Outwitly, we are huge fans of Miro, and our team uses the platform almost daily. Whether it’s for brainstorming new marketing strategies, gathering trending topics for our newsletter, synthesizing user research, or conducting workshop sessions with stakeholders, Miro makes remote collaboration simple and effective.
Miro is many things: it’s an online whiteboard to draw, write, and organize thoughts on, a tool for team collaboration, a platform for planning workflows and brainstorming ideas, and a resource for finding your next project or UX template. The best part is that Miro is incredibly collaborative, responsive, and user-friendly, allowing multiple users to work on the same board simultaneously, making it perfect for virtual meetings.
If you’re unfamiliar with Miro’s newest updates as of July 2024, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of their three biggest updates and how these features will improve your workflow and help you collaborate with your team like never before!
We’ll cover:
- Miro Launches Intelligent Canvas – AI Tool for Innovation
- Miro’s Composable Workflows for Sprint Planning, Journey Mapping, and More
- New Miro AI: Shortcuts, Sidekicks, and Feedback
Miro’s New AI Tool for Innovation: Intelligent Canvas
Like most projects, you’ll begin with a blank canvas, and Miro’s canvas just got some major upgrades. Miro’s new releases this month are driven by their motto, “Miro is a home for everyone,” and their core values of providing cross-functional value, an exceptional canvas, and ahead-of-the-curve AI improvements. These values are definitely represented in their new feature announcements, especially their Intelligent Canvas update.
So, what’s new? Let’s take a look at each new feature Miro is adding to their canvas:
Diagramming Mode
This new feature optimizes your Miro canvas for easier and quicker creation, allowing you to pull together flowcharts and diagrams quickly. Instead of building your diagrams from scratch, you can simply ask AI to generate a diagram, and it will gather all the information it needs from your notes and create a draft just like that! If the AI diagram doesn’t quite suit your fancy, this mode also comes equipped with improved layer support and shape packs to help you create.
Spaces
Miro is shaking things up with the introduction of Spaces! This feature takes what was formerly known as Projects and transforms it into a new space! When sharing projects between teams, you’ll be able to access the entire environment that the project lives in. You’ll see supplementary files, other project drafts, and whatever else is tied to that project.
This update will not only make sharing more accessible but also allow you to understand projects on a larger scale and see what else exists within them. It’s like getting a key to access a whole mansion, not just one room.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this Spaces feature, but we do know there are more exciting things to come!
Software Development Kit
With the announcement of Miro’s software development kit, the Canvas SDK, some significant tech advancements are underway. Similar to the Figma Community plugins (learn more here), Miro’s new Canvas SDK also leverages the knowledge of the design community to improve the user’s experience.
This update allows you to design custom Miro widgets through JavaScript and React and share them with the entire Miro community. This feature is still in its early stages, but soon, we can expect lots of new intelligent widgets created by Miro lovers for Miro lovers! We assume these shareable widgets will live within the Miroverse, Miro’s public community sharing space.
Some examples of widgets include interactive polls, spinner wheels, and dot voting widgets. More advanced widgets like timelines are also in the works, enabling teams to carry out project management tasks like scope planning in real-time directly on the Miro canvas. Everyone using Miro, from members to guests to visitors, can see and interact with these new widgets, making the platform even more fun, collaborative, and engaging.
How this Update will Optimize your Workflow:
Increased Efficiency: With the AI advancements in Miro’s diagram mode and the shape packs available at your disposal, creating diagrams and flows will be much easier and quicker. This will reduce manual effort and allow you to focus on refinement and other aspects of the design process.
Enhanced Clarity and Collaboration: Much like Figma Slides, we’re noticing an increased industry focus on collaboration and community-building. With the new features from Figma and now with the Intelligent Canvas updates from Miro, it is clear that both platforms are working hard to make improvements so we can work with our teams more effectively down the road.
Miro’s Spaces feature will improve the sharing process between team members, and the Canvas SDK feature will empower designers to contribute to and engage with the design community. The Interactive widgets, voting, heat checks, and spinner wheels supported by Canvas SDK can help promote inclusivity and enhance your collaboration experience. Better collaboration leads to better ideas and better work!
Miro’s Composable Workflows for Sprint Planning, Journey Mapping, and More
Image Source: https://miro.com/diagramming/what-is-a-workflow-diagram/
Many users (including us!) turn to Miro because of its highly visual and responsive design, making it a perfect tool for developing various workflows and maps. So, when Miro announced they were improving building workflows, we were over the moon! Let’s look at these new workflow updates and how they will change the way we build road maps and sprints.
Roadmapping
Miro and roadmapping are a match made in heaven. Ever since our team discovered Miro, we’ve been using the platform to create effective and visually appealing road mapping workflows.
Now, Miro is introducing an interactive timeline widget that allows multiple team members to adjust the project scope in real-time. This feature will enable teams to dynamically and collaboratively modify timelines, tasks, and milestones directly within the Miro canvas. Plus, team members can see all the changes made by others, which will ensure the whole team is aligned on the project scope and up to date!
Sprint-Retrospective Planning
Another reason many flock to Miro is that it is a great space to host and plan sprint retrospectives. These meetings are essential and can power your team forward, and we even wrote a two-part blog post about them. With this update, Miro is making it easier to facilitate these meetings and plan these workflows. And the best part? The update includes Agile methodology widgets!
All without ever leaving the Miro canvas, you can assign tasks, estimate story points for tasks, and track capacity. If your team follows a Kanban or a Waterfall methodology, Miro has the tools for you, too! Plus, all of their widgets are bi-directionally synced with Jira, Atlassian’s project management tool, so you can map it all out in Miro while keeping your team perfectly updated. Streamlining collaboration has never been easier, all within Miro’s creative space.
Have we mentioned that we love sprint retrospectives? Head over to our blog about our 5 favourite sprint retrospective methods, with links to ready-to-use Miro templates!
How this Update will Optimize your Workflow:
Super-Charged Teams: Miro’s new real-time collaborative tools, like their interactive timeline widgets and Kanban boards, will power and super-glue your team together like never before. These updates will increase collaboration, productivity, and alignment across all team members, promoting informed and fun collective decision-making. This is a huge win for our project management teams!
New Miro AI: Shortcuts, Sidekicks, and Feedback
Did you know that 12 million stickies are created in Miro per day? That’s more than the population of New York City! As much as we love stickies, that’s a lot of stickies… so much so that sometimes the boards we create can be overwhelming to the eye and a lot to process. This is why Miro is launching brand new AI assistants to help you!
Here are three ways Miro’s new AI will help you:
1. AI Shortcuts
From the toolbar, you’ll be able to access AI shortcuts that can help you with whatever you need. For one, you can select all the stickies on a board, use your AI shortcut, and convert them into one nice Word document. You can say goodbye to taking hand-typed notes and copying and pasting your content manually!
This AI feature can also assist you with microcopy edits and help you adjust your writing tone. You can ask Miro’s AI to make your copy shorter and more straightforward or even change the tone to be more casual, professional, or friendly— whatever you need.
2. Sidekicks
Who doesn’t love a free assistant? Miro has announced a whole batch of new sidekicks that can provide feedback, fresh perspectives, and review your work. Plus, you can choose from various assistant types, like product leaders, product Agile coaches, product marketers, and stakeholders, to get a feel for what these professionals would think or say about your work. Different assistant types can offer different opinions and perspectives to orient your text and creations to whichever audience you need in a way that is best suited for them.
As if that weren’t cool enough, these AI assistants even have their own cursor, can scan over your work, drop new comments, and ask questions—it’s almost like a real person!
Image taken from Miro’s ‘What’s Next’ Event
3. Summarizing Feedback
Another way Miro’s AI will help you is by summarizing and synthesizing large quantities of text. Simply hover over the comment threads and hit ‘summarize,’ and the AI will cut through all the noise and hand you back what is useful. This can save you the headache of reading through each and every comment!
This new AI feature can also summarize your Miro boards. This specific functionality is still under construction, but soon enough, we can expect to see Miro’s AI conducting analysis interpretation of our boards.
Check out this page to learn more about Miro pricing plans and how to access these AI features.
We are so excited to start working with these new features and tools, and we hope you are too! Miro is surely positioning itself as a future-oriented company that listens to its users’ needs and embraces AI in its fullest potential. We look forward to conducting more engaging, interactive workshops, planning efficient workflows, and optimizing our tasks using these features, and we can’t wait to see what else is in store for Miro down the road.
If you enjoyed learning about these updates and would like to stay in the loop about other UX industry news, check out our newsletter, the Weekly Wit and stay connected through our Instagram and Linkedin.
See you in the Miroverse!
