Miro - An effective design tool

As I aim to develop an adequate level of professionalism, it is crucial for me to be able to use a variety of apps and software to boost my career. A beneficial tool for starting design projects is Miro. I learned about it through a training tutorial in our course. Miro is essentially a digital workbook; convenient for brainstorming ideas, user story maps, journey maps and other types of frameworks; a great place to organise notes collected during design projects. It is also a great tool for remote collaboration and will enhance the qualitative productivity of team projects.

Miro can be an essential tool to remind myself how to get my brain thinking clearly with possible ideas, the progression of structured processes and insights to my stakeholders. I create personas using Miro. For my folio, this persona simulates what an employer would be like finding my site.

Notice the sticky-notes, templates and embedded texts and images - these are all features very convenient to create and execute. Coupled with the minimalist style, Miro just proves to show itself as a broad and user-friendly app to use.

It is useful to me how Miro has a lot of freedom in its large variety of resources. You can add other apps to access a library of other templates and copyright-free stock images. Google Drive and Adobe Creative Clouds are also among the apps that can be added and enables file sharing and storage.

Miro has many features that would aid in the design process. However, it would not be a tool for creating prototypes that require exporting or printing in formats such as RGB, CMYK, or for laser cutting and 3D modelling since it does not have those features. As a digital workbook, it is helpful for things like fitting a draft format of a website which I could use for my online folio, or making a draft layout for an app. Miro’s clean design-tools are suitable as a medium to create prototypes for design processes.

The Interaction Design Foundation mentions prototyping is as an experimental model used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions and other conceptions.

"Prototypes can be quick and rough — useful for early-stage testing and learning — and can also be fully formed and detailed..." (I.D.F. 2020)

For such early-stage testing and learning, Miro is an inexpensive alternative in simulating user experience which provide as a prop with role-playing for feedback. Ultimately, it will help designers or aspiring designers like me to make appropriate refinements based on resulted observations. Being able to communicate and keep notes of early brainstorming ideas while having certain layouts of prototypes are undoubtedly aspects that will filter them to a higher quality.

Miro Training by Fitz-Walter Z.

Reference:

Feiis R. D.. Teo Y. S. (2020, March) Design Thinking: Get Started with Prototyping (Interaction Design Foundation)

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