Our advice for bringing new visual collaborators into the app.
We realize that learning a new way of working and a new application is exciting, but might be daunting for some collaborators. You need everyone focused on the content of the meeting, not features. Simplify the experience by giving an opportunity for the group to do a low-risk activity together, like a warm up exercise, before the meeting or workshop starts. This not only sets expectations for the level of participation in the session, but it also gives everyone a chance to build confidence with MURAL and the other apps you’re using in the meeting.
Some facilitators prefer to host a separate session to do this energizer or warm-up activity. Other facilitators use the early part of a session to give the participants time to learn and meet one another. Find your new favorite MURAL warm up activity template.
To get collaborators feeling confident using MURAL, we recommend you introduce these four key parts of the experience.
Murals are large spaces for you to work together. Demonstrate how to move around the mural and how to adjust the settings in the mural for their device.
Demonstrate and show participants how to add objects like sticky notes to the mural from the left toolbar. You can also teach them shortcuts for speedy collaboration.
Help them build confidence by adding more objects from the toolbar. Your warm up activity can help them learn the features of MURAL and show them how to work visually.
As the team moves through the meeting or workshop, they will need to follow the activities and people in the mural. Demonstrate and explain how to follow other collaborators so everyone is aligned and focused. As the facilitator, you can also guide participants by summoning them throughout the session.
Hey there, it's Daniela, and I'm here to tell you how to train new MURAL. So let's say you're running a meeting, or workshop and a few days, and some people are brand new to MURAL, we know it's awesome. But to be honest, it could be pretty daunting for somebody brand new.
So, what can you do as a facilitator to ensure the success of your session? Well, first off, you want to make sure you're allocating time to run a quick Energizer to have everybody on the same page. Now, there are a couple things that you need your participants to be comfortable with for the session to be successful.
So the first one I would say is, make sure they adjust their zoom settings, send them to the bottom right of their screen, so they can choose how they want to navigate the canvas. This may take a few moments. For each person to be comfortable with their zoom settings, you're good.
Next step, make sure they know how to add stickies. Just double click anywhere on the canvas to add your stickies. If they're able to do this, they will be able to collaborate no problem. Good with it.
Next step, make sure they can add icons. They can use the ones we have in the library, or they can search for new ones. Hopefully they can also change the size and change the colors and then you're really ready to collaborate and do some fun things together.
Last step, I would say they need to know how to follow somebody. In order to follow someone they just need to click on their avatar to see what they are seeing. Like in this case, I'm going to follow visiting bear and see what they are seeing. Still confused? It just takes a little time.
Keep participants focused in the mural when you’re working together in real time.
MURAL allows each participant to choose what they see in the mural when collaborating in a live meeting or workshop. This gives collaborators autonomy, but sometimes you want to bring everyone to view the same content on the mural. This is especially critical when facilitating since you might need to explain an activity or share examples. To help teams stay in sync visually, MURAL provides two features: Follow and summon.
The follow feature invites participants in the mural to share your view. Anyone in the mural can ask collaborators to follow them in the mural. However, collaborators do not have to accept the invitation to follow. To invite collaborators to follow you:
You can also follow other collaborators in the mural. Follow anyone on the mural by clicking on their avatar and “Follow.” You will be able to see what the person is looking at in the mural. This provides clarity as you’re working in a space with others. To unfollow a collaborator, you can zoom out or move away from their view. You are not locked into their view in the mural.
As the facilitator in a mural, you can keep the team focused by summoning participants. Bring their attention towards one part of the mural. Before you summon collaborators, let them know so they aren’t alarmed by the sudden change of view in the mural.
Here’s how:
Need to ensure collaborators remain in this space in the mural? Manage their view with the take control capability. This means that collaborators will not be able to navigate away from your view until you release them.
Hello there, I'm Hailey Temple, and let me share with you how to use the follow feature. What I can do to ask people to follow me, is go to my avatar at the bottom of the Mural right here, and a menu will appear. Now I'm going to click Ask to be Followed, and what that does is send kind of a beacon to everybody in this Mural with me, to come share the same view. So if the visiting hippopotamus, for example, wanted me to follow it, I would see this beacon, and what I can do is click Follow, and now I'll see the hippopotamus and what they're looking at in this Mural.
Now, what if I want to see what somebody is up to in the Mural, like the visiting bird? I can click the visiting bird's avatar at the bottom, and now I see that it's looking at this view in the Mural. When you need to share your view or see what somebody else is seeing in a Mural, use that follow feature and get everybody aligned.
Summon is a facilitation superpower, meaning that only people who have the ability to facilitate on your Mural, can actually use it. And use it wisely, because here's how it works. When you want to summon people, go down to your avatar at the bottom of the Mural, and hover over your avatar, a menu is going to appear. You're going to click Summon Everyone, but not yet. Before you do, announce to everybody, "I'm going to summon you in this Mural, so you can see what I'm seeing." I do this because it's kind of a courtesy thing. It can be a little bit alarming for people to suddenly shift from one space in the Mural to another.
Now I'm going to show you the view of a participant, so you see what happens. So I'll go to my avatar, click Summon Everyone, say, "I'm going to summon you now," and snap. Everybody is looking at the same thing. So the participant knows now they are following me, and I know how many people are following me. It's great because now everybody is on the same page, and is looking at the same thing in the mural.
Keep focused on the content during real-time collaboration sessions.
When you’re collaborating in a live meeting or workshop, you can see everyone’s cursors moving around the mural. While some enjoy seeing everyone in the mural, others find the cursors distracting. As a collaborator or facilitator, you can help keep yourself and others focused. You will still see others adding content to the mural, but won’t see the names or cursors as you work.
Here’s how to hide and show all cursors:
MURAL automatically broadcasts your cursor to your collaborators. However, you can turn off this option while working in the mural by hovering over your avatar and unchecking the broadcast my cursor option.
Hide cursors for collaborators
As a facilitator in a mural, you can also hide cursors for all collaborators to reduce distractions. Here’s how:
Hello there. I'm Hayley Temple and let me talk to you about hiding and showing cursors in your mural. Seeing other people collaborate in a mural is awesome, but if you have lots of people working, it can feel a little bit overwhelming.
Good news. You can hide and show cursors in a mural, and here's how I'm going to go down to my avatar down here and I have the option when I hover over my avatar to hide cursors. What happens is people's cursors disappear. This is handy if you're working with a large group and ah, lot of cursors can be hiding work or be a little bit overwhelming.
You can still see I know who's collaborating in the mural and whose adding content but their cursors are out of the way to turn the cursor capability back on, hover over your avatar again and click show cursors, and now everyone's will be back on. Remember, you can also hide and show your own cursor by hovering over your avatar and clicking broadcast or hide my own cursor here, so recap toe hide or show cursors.
Go to your avatar, click high cursor or show cursor, and you can clean up or show all the collaborators in your working space. happy collaborating.
Elevate your visual collaboration sessions with Quick Talk, powered by Dolby.io.
Visuals help create context and alignment, but sometimes the best way to build understanding is by talking through concepts. Rather than create a new videoconference session, you can start a conversation directly in a mural so everyone can stay focused where the work happens.
If you have an enterprise plan, then your workspace administrator can disable Quick Talk in the workspace settings.
Hi there, Lindsay here, and we're going to talk about quick talk. You can now elevate your collaboration sessions with quick talk, a new voice calling capability within MURAL. Instantly jump on a call when you're in a mural to connect with their collaborators.
No need to find a and share a link, just click on the phone icon here, and you'll be able to start a call with other collaborators. Notice you click on start, click quick talk. And then you hit start. Now you're going to wait for participants and when they're able to join, you'll just be able to hear their audio. To mute and unmute. You click right there right on the microphone.
Then to end and leave the call. You just click on the HANG UP button. Perfect. So it's best for those unplanned conversations that require you to briefly connect with your team and only enhance your mural working sessions.
Quick talk gives you a fast, easy way to sync on progress, align on next steps, work through roadblocks and even review updates with your team. It brings us back to those that elusive feeling of gathering in a room with your team that would so often lead to big breakthroughs and a shared sense of purpose.
The outstanding quality that comes from working with Dolby.io doesn't hurt either. Also note that using Dolby.io not just gives us wonderful sound quality, but also all calls are secure and not recorded. All right. Well, thank you and that's all about MURAL’s feature called Quick talk.
Share feedback and work asynchronously with your collaborators in a mural.
Comments are feedback that you can leave with other collaborators to help you communicate better on a project. With this, you can send messages easily as you collaborate on several projects or across time zones. You'll be notified by email (or Slack) when someone leaves a comment, and when someone tags you, so you can get back to them when you have time.
There are two ways to add comments to content in the mural: from the toolbar or directly onto the canvas.
The first method of adding comments to MURAL is to use sticky notes.
Alternatively, you can add comments when you right-click anywhere on your canvas.
When you join the mural, you can follow the comments alongside the left side of the mural. Each collaborator has a unique color for their comments that matches the color of their avatar, so you can follow the conversation whenever you want.
Hey there, I'm Hailey Temple. And let me tell you about comments, which are awesome ways to leave feedback or a little note for your teammate when you can be in a mural at the same time. There are two ways to add comments to the canvas. First is in the toolbar, I'll go to this sticky note icon, click, and this menu pops up. This little the speech bubble is for comments. So I will click and drag this to the element where I want to leave the comment. What's awesome is I can type in somebody's name and let them know something. And when I click Send, it's going to send that person a notification that they have a new comment from me Another way to add a comment is by right clicking somewhere on this canvas where I want to add a comment and this menu pops up. I'll select Add comment, and same thing. Add a little comment here. Click Send. And now this comment is here for anyone to reference at any time. So, get started using comments in your work and happy collaborating.
Democratize how teams surface what matters with dot voting.
You’ve run a brainstorming session with a group and realize there are too many possibilities and concepts to proceed. How do you quickly narrow down your ideas and ensure everyone can input what they want to move forward for the project? Dot voting is a simple yet effective method to prioritize and bring the team together. As a facilitator in a mural, you can set up voting sessions to prioritize these concepts.
A common challenge in group voting scenarios is “Group Think.” This means that collaborators know or actually see what their other group members are advocating for and add their own votes to the same concept because “everyone else did.” Voting in a mural is anonymous, so collaborators won’t see or know who voted for what concepts in the mural.
Facilitators in the mural can start a voting session in a mural that includes the voting session topic, number of votes, and controls for who can end the voting session. Here’s how:
Select next and begin voting. This opens the voting sessions for your collaborators.
When the voting session starts, click the object where you want your vote to go. Spread votes across different objects or vote for the same object multiple times. MURAL shows you where your votes go by designating a number to the object. At the top of the mural, you will see how many votes you have remaining for the session.
To delete the vote from the object. Hold the shift key and click the object again. You will see the number of votes change in your total count.
Facilitators can see who is actively voting and who still has votes to cast during the session. In the top toolbar of the, the facilitator will see how many collaborators are voting. Click the arrow next to the number of collaborators voting to get live updates of voters and their remaining votes.
When you’re ready to see the voting results, here’s how you end the voting session and share with your collaborators.
Review voting results from the session any time by clicking the voting button at the top of the mural. Then, select view results page.
Lindsay here. Now, I'm going to show you how to run a voting session. You might want to run a voting session similar to dot voting when you're in person to anonymously get everybody's feedback on a list of items.
Now to start a voting session, and you'll see we're going to do a voting session here on favorite activities. In the top left hand corner, there's a button for voting sessions right next to the timer. If I click on that, I can click start voting session. Now when I started voting session, I can name it so I'm gonna say favorite activity.
You could you get to decide how many votes each person gets. I'm gonna say three. And then you can also decide who and you can end the voting session. You can say any member of the mural, or only people that are facilitators in the mural. Click Next, and then click on begin voting.
Now to add a vote to an element, you click and you'll notice the one shows up here on dancing. To remove a vote, hold down Shift, and then click again. And you'll notice the one goes away. Now I have three votes. I'm going to click on dancing, running and knitting. You'll now see here in this voting bar, I have no votes left. I can also see that there are two people voting. If I click on the down arrow, I can see who else is voting because of who else is also in the mural canvas. I can see that the visiting cell has three votes left. And when the visiting snail votes again, that tick for the two votes, one vote zero votes left will count down.
At any point in time, you can end the voting session once the voting session is ended. you confirm that you want to end the voting session and session for everyone. You'll see the voting results page. This shows the total number of votes, see one vote, and also underneath each of the the elements that got to vote the number of unique voters.
So for instance, something could get multiple votes, but all come from one voter, like if I use all three of my votes on running. Now, if I exit out of the voting results screen, I can see I can still see the voting results here. If I click the little x, the voting results will disappear. However, you can always go back to voting results by clicking on voting session, and show results page or show the Volt's votes.
So show results page and it brings me back to the voting results page. Now, one thing to note is that voting is completely Anonymous. That's why it's very beneficial for your team to use. Say after you did an ideation, I prioritization and then a vote to understand what everybody would like to vote for but in a non in an anonymous fashion. Now you're you just learned how to run a voting session in MURAL.
Use the timer to keep track of activities while collaborating with others in a mural.
Creative collaboration feeds on constraints. In meetings and workshops, the work will expand to fit the time you provide. Setting time limits in a meeting is an effective time management method called time boxing. When you create a meeting agenda, you limit activities in your session to a fixed amount of time. This helps meeting participants stay on time and productive.
As a facilitator in a mural, You can set time limits with your team directly within a mural with the timer feature.
As a facilitator in MURAL, you can use timers when working with other people in a mural. You have the power to add and change timers as you please. This makes activities more fun and keeps participants on their toes. How to use the timer:
You can also set the timer manually.
You can also inform participants that the time is up with a sound notification. When the timer ends, MURAL automatically notifies your collaborators with a tone. The facilitator can turn off the sound notifications if needed.
Hey there, I'm Hailey Temple and I'm going to show you how to use the timer in MURAL. So, I use the timer when I am working with other people in a mural. And when I am a facilitator in that mural, so I have this star around my avatar at the bottom, and I have this nice badge denoting that I'm a facilitator. So, I have the ability to add and change the timer in the mural.
Here's how I add time and start the timer. I'm going to select this clock button up here on the mural. And the timer starts with five minutes, but I can change the time by clicking the minus or plus button. I can also just add how much time I want manually.
When I'm ready to go, I'll click start timer. Now, the mural will start keeping track of that time and counting down. Everybody in the mural can see how much time there is with this clock icon. Now, at any time, if I want to, I can change how much time there is, I can either pause the timer, I can add a minute, I can add five minutes, or I can end the timer.
When the timer comes to an end, the group gets a notification with some sound and a bar announcing the time has ended. The timer is a great way to keep track of activities or a whole meeting while you're collaborating in a mural with others.
Keep your work in place, even as collaborators move freely in the mural.
Your collaborators can move around the mural, but that doesn’t mean that you want your content to move with them. Locking content to the canvas ensures that collaborators don’t accidentally move something during a meeting or workshop. You can relax knowing that your work will stay in place. If you’re facilitating in a meeting, you can also use the superlock feature.
To unlock, right-click the object and select unlock.
Instead of locking and unlocking individual elements, you can do it all at once to save time. You can lock several elements by:
Hi, I'm Megan and in this video, I'm going to show you how to lock and unlock content in your murals. So, in this mural, I have prepared an activity that I'm going to do with my team. But I don't want them to accidentally move certain kinds of content. So this title here, and this framework, I want to make sure that it stays put in so we can just focus on doing the activity with these sticky notes. So in order to keep my team from accidentally moving things around, I'm going to select this framework. And we're going to right click it and choose the lock option. So for this exercise, I'm just going to say any member can unlock. We'll go over the difference between the two of these options in a separate video. So I'm going to choose any member can unlock. And now I can tell that my framework is locked, because I see this little lock icon in the bottom right. If I want to move my framework or resize it or make any Changes to anything that I've locked, I can unlock them by saying, unlock and if I have multiple things unlocked in the same mural. So if I lock both of these down and I decide I want to make a big change, I can just say, right click directly on the surface of the mural and say unlock all. So everything that is locked in this mural will become unlocked. And I can select it and edit it freely. And that's it. You're good to go.
Manage who can move objects in your mural with this facilitation superpower.
As a facilitator, you have extra capabilities that set you apart from other collaborators. When you set up an activity with your team, you don’t want anyone to move around objects you’ve added
Before you invite collaborators into your mural, the facilitator lock—or superlock—can prevent collaborators from actually moving these objects
The lock feature is available to anyone collaborating in the mural. This prevents anyone from moving content during a meeting or workshop. However, anyone in the mural can unlock one or all of the content with the regular lock feature.
Superlock restricts locking and unlocking content to anyone with the facilitator power in the mural. You can tell who is a facilitator by checking that they have a star on their avatar in the mural
To unlock the object, right-click the element and select unlock from the drop down menu
Build your design skills in MURAL with this hands-on activity. You need a mural account to create a mural from this template. Get started with MURAL today, free.
Hi, I'm Megan and in this video, I'm going to go over facilitator locking. So, only facilitators can facilitator lock elements in a MURAL. So, I can tell I'm a facilitator, in this mural this tag here at the top that says facilitator. And what that allows me to do basically is when I've set up an activity that I'm going to do with my team, like I have here, I have this icebreaker.
There are certain parts of this that I don't want anybody to move around by accident. And I know that I can lock it down normally. I also know that some of the people that are going to participate in this activity are members. And if they want to, they will be able to unlock things. So I have a superpower as a facilitator, that allows me to facilitate or lock things down instead of locking them normally.
So I've selected all the things I don't want anybody to move. I'm going to right click I'm going to go to the lock option. And then here I can see that I have two options any member can unlock. I don't want to do that because I know that participants who are members will be able to unlock parts of my mural that I have built for this activity. So instead, I'm going to choose only facilitators can unlock. And so that means just me or anyone else that I have given facilitator permissions to will be able to unlock that content.
So if I click on it, I can tell that it is facilitator locked because it has a gray icon. And just to show you what it looks like, I'm going to create a sticky note and lock it normally. So any member can unlock and show you the difference. So here, it's locked and any member can unlock this I can tell because it has the black like lock icon. Here. It has the grey lock icon and this represents things that are facilitator locked. So that's it.
Outlines are great for knowing exactly where objects are on the mural. Here’s how you can use this to efficiently convey the flow.
When you’re planning a meeting or workshop, you may break your work into smaller sections. This is especially useful if you’re presenting content to your collaborators and want them to follow the conversation. If you think about your mural as a place to create a visual story, then the outline breaks the content into different chapters.
The outline is also great for navigating your collaborators around the mural. Every collaborator can click through the outline in a mural to move through these different chapters.
Facilitators on MURAL can create an outline for easy navigation. Here’s how to create an outline:
When you build an outline, your participants will automatically see it in the mural. They can hide or bring the outline back into view at any time.
Guide your participants around the mural to share your work or tell a story. Presentation mode allows you to walk through content like a slideshow.
To start presentation mode:
Create focus during meetings and works by hiding and revealing content on the mural at the right moment. Hiding and revealing content helps simplify the experience for your participants when collaborating. Once you add content to the outline, here’s how you hide and reveal the content:
Every area you add to a mural is included in the outline. Click on the bulleted list to access your mural. You can also get a participant to go to a specific section by linking them to the step. Here’s how. How to link to a step:
Select link to this step
Hey team. Augstin from MURAL here and today I want to tell you a bit about our outline. The outline is an amazing feature that allows the facilitator off a canvas to simply organized and arranged the content that they have inside of the mural for much easier and smoother navigation, not only for them but for every single user that accesses the mural.
This is because the outline will always come up the moment that you access a new mural. You can see it right here on the right side of my screen. This column on the ride is the outline. As you can see, I have nine different steps added to it, so it also efficiently conveys the flow that you're supposed to follow.
Once you enter the mural, you know that you're supposed to start on welcome than what is MURAL, How is MURAL organized and so on. It's super easy to use it for navigation as well, because when you click on one of those steps that has been added to the outline, you'll be taken directly to that spot in an instant, so you can instantly follow every single one of those steps If you want to hide the outline because you already know how to navigate around the canvas and you know the flow that you're supposed to follow, you can simply hit the exit key here on the top right corner of the canvas, and you'll be able to move on your own without any problems.
If you want to see the outline again, then simply click on the outline icon on the top right corner of the screen to reveal it once more. This way, you know your way around the canvas and you know the flow that you're supposed to follow. I wanna tell you a bit about our hide feature. This allows you to hide and reveal steps that you previously added to the outline.
All that you need to do is simply hover over that step on the outline and you'll see this eye icon pop up. You can click on that to hide the elements, and now nobody inside of the canvas will actually be able to see them. You can click on the I again to reveal it at any point so everyone can actually pay attention to it.
This comes in very handy If maybe you want to keep the attention in one specific part of the canvas, you can hide the rest of the elements on the other sections that you have in your mural to make sure that nobody is drifting off or changing focus from section to section. You can reveal those steps as you go along to better run your session. Or maybe you have a big surprise planned out for the end.
You can hide that surprise so that it stays a surprise and reveal it when your session ends. That way, you can always end your sessions with a bang.
Keep the team focused on the story thanks to presentation mode.
During a meeting you may want to show the team your concepts before you collaborate. You can leverage presentation mode alongside your favorite video conferencing tools to show a visual story of your concepts in a mural. Then, you can move between presentation mode and invite collaborators to contribute to the conversation with hands-on activities.
In order to use the presentation mode in MURAL, you need to build an outline.
Hey team, Augstin from MURAL here, and today I want to tell you a bit more about presentation mode. Presentation mode is a very nice feature that allows you to simply go through each of the steps that you previously added to the outline as a presentation. This means that each of those steps will act as a different slide, and you won't see any of the user interface on your screen for a much cleaner experience. What you can do to enter presentation mode is first of all, open the outline by clicking on the outline icon on the top right corner of your screen. Once that's open, you'll be able to see on the top right corner, this canvas icon. Simply clicking on it allows you to enter presentation mode. As you can see, I don't have the toolbar on the left side. I don't see the Share button or the Export button on the top right corner of my screen, or the avatars of the different users at the bottom border. This allows me to simply use my keyboard arrows to go through each of those steps that I've previously added as a presentation. So, it's a very good alternative if maybe you want to run things from your end your session in a much more professional looking way. Maybe you have a session with your key stakeholders. And you don't want them to see you clicking around throughout the entire canvas, when you can simply enter presentation mode to run things in a much more streamlined way. Once you're done with your presentation, all that you need to do to exit it is simply click on the exit presentation button on the top right corner of the screen. This allows you to go back to the main canvas and keep on collaborating with all of your users.
Move between or within murals by linking objects together.
A mural can quickly become a story when you link relevant content together. Not only does linking objects provide context to your collaborators as they move through the mural, but it also creates an engaging experience. You can link anything to a specific object, including links to different murals. To create these connections between content, you will need to get the link to the object that will be the next destination.
Here’s how:
Hello, this is your friendly neighborhood Gino with MURAL, and today we're going to be talking about adding links to elements. If you can see on my screen here, it looks like we've got this yellow dot, but it seems to be asking me if I want to see what this yellow dot looks like when it's happy. Luckily, before this video showed me exactly what it looks like, he gave me the link so we can all see together. So what I'm going to do is click on my object, the toolbar that pops up, you can see this little link icon here it says Edit link. Click on that, and then I can paste my link in there and you want to make sure you hit enter to make sure that that open Link button pops up. What I can do is then click on the Open Link button, it'll open a new tab and look at our yellow. He looks so happy that once again want to make sure you click on your element over the toolbar, click on Edit link and into your link and have some fun. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I'm Gino Valencia. Have a great day.
Take your mural beyond the app to wherever you work together.
Hello there, I'm Hailey Temple. And I know that sometimes you aren't working in mural, you need to take your work beyond into presentations or attach to an email or add into your own project management work.
Exporting murals is a handy way to bring your mural beyond. So I'm in this mural that I want to share as a PDF. And what I'll do is click this Export button right here. Mural actually gives me a few options. I could also export it as an image. I could get a zip file with HTML code that I can use to share the elements of my mural. I can actually get in code to embed a mural into a website, or I could publish it as a template.
For now I'm going to select PDF and mural will send me a notification. If you have the integration with slack. Then we will let you know when the export is ready, or you're going to get an email from us that your export is ready.
Now, when I click this download PDF button, I will get redirected to a page where I can download my PDF. And here it is, my work is ready to take beyond mural and share anywhere. Happy exploring.
