 In this video we'll discuss if Mural is the right tool for your customer journey mapping project. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Server Design Show. In this video we'll talk about if Mural is a suitable tool for day-to-day use around customer journey mapping projects. If you haven't seen the first video where we created the basic structure of a customer journey map using Mural, check it out over here. At the end of the video I'll talk about some of the pros and cons that I found when using Mural for customer journey mapping but first let's dive in and I'll share my screen and show you some of the more advanced features that are I think essential for any tool that you'll want to use on a day-to-day basis to actually run customer journey mapping projects. So we're back in the map that we've created in the first video, the model of all maps, the basic structure of a customer journey map. If you have this you can expand it basically to anything you want and the first feature that I think is essential for any serious journey mapping tool that you want to use on a day-to-day basis is the ability to collaborate and share and luckily Mural has a very big pink button which says share and allows you to invite teammates and also people outside of your organization to see this map, edit it, collaborate on it and it even gives you the option if we click here on manage to define if somebody is able to export it, duplicate it, invite people so you can change a lot of settings around sharing. Sharing is really what is really well integrated in Mural so that's we can give all the points to Mural for the ability to share and collaborate on maps. So the next thing we'd want from a good journey mapping tool is the ability to change states in a map to indicate where things are changing because our journey map isn't a static image, it's not an artifact and end result, it's not a deliverable, it's like my friend Daniel Euroman says it's a change plan so we need to be able to indicate where things happen. Mural offers a few options to do that, we could for instance use border, the ability to change the borders like we could indicate that the dotted border indicates stages that we're working on or that they are in progress so we can use maybe background color that we want that this we need to remove this or this is work in progress or we could do something like add an icon which is over here maybe work let's see what it finds would work, hammer or I don't know yeah let's use a hammer for work in progress so there are a few ways that you could indicate states of cards which is really really important. Now the next thing that is really important for a good journey mapping tool is the ability to see version history revisions and the reason why you want to have revision history is when you're collaborating not if but when you're collaborating with other teammates you want to see what people have done how the map has evolved have people edit additional research insights that they promised they should do and did they actually log into to view the map so again this is really well baked in into mural they have this icon over here which shows activity and you see everything that has been done with the map and that it has been done by me so that's another win from mural this version history is really important especially when you're collaborating and it works now the final feature that I want to have in a journey mapping tool is the ability to export and again mural has a big button that says export we can we have a few options pdf png zip files let's do png and okay this might take a few minutes but it allows you to export your area of the map and this allows you to print it out put it on the wall then maybe two weeks later do another snapshot and put it on the wall and then see visually see what has changed in your map so this is really good so now let's dive into some of their pros and cons of mural that I found and the first thing the general a general remark is that mural is not a data dedicated journey mapping tool it's I consider it to be more of a online whiteboard you can do anything with it it's a blank canvas that allows you to um draw and add things that you need that's why they also offer a huge library of templates sort of canvases and mural is super flexible it can basically do what you need it to do it's a whiteboard at the same time this is sort of a disadvantage for you as a customer journey mapping pro because you don't you have to make the structure you need it doesn't guide you in any way there is a blueprint surface blueprint template but still you need to come up with what you need of course you can take this model of all map structure and use that as a styling point but for some people I can imagine that they would like to have a little bit more guidance and um yeah that's just not part of mural mural super flexible which is great but also might be a challenge there are two things uh a mural that make it hard for me to see it as a tool to use on a day-to-day basis uh focus on journey mapping and the two features are let's dive into my screen again um the first feature is imagine that we would want to add another card in between buy tickets and park the car so what we would have to do is we would have to select this card move it over to somewhere here then maybe add move this card over here and then move this card here and then you know you get the you have to do a lot of manual moving and resize this one it's possible uh but what if we decided to remove this one we need to sort of manually put everything back again this isn't a question if it will happen your map it isn't a static image it's a it's it's alive so it will change it will evolve and you need to be able to really quickly adapt and make changes it's possible on mural but it will take time and the more complex your map gets the more shoving and shuffling you'll have to do that's that's that yeah that's not really nice the other thing that makes it hard to use mural for more advanced journey mapping is that you don't really have the ability to add meta data in your lanes in your cards like i said we have the option to add comments this is already a thing but we can't add images in here we can't define what kind of comment this is and again this isn't a question if you want to add additional details to a card this is like you need to add additional details to your card and mural doesn't really offer that option at least it's the option it offers is really basic there are two things that i like about mural and that is the ability to collaborate and share they make it super easy to do that the version history is great super useful and the other thing that's a nice to have it's like the icon library and it's the image library that we talked about these could be useful depending on your needs but these two things are i think a plus and a win for mural so when would i recommend to use mural for your journey mapping projects well if you already have a license on mural and you're already using it you're familiar with the interface it allows you to pretty quickly digitize the results of a workshop that's that's where mural is pretty good for i wouldn't i don't i wouldn't see myself using this on a day-to-day basis after a project after a workshop because it mural makes it quite challenging it's quite challenging in mural that's a better way to phrase it to update the map and keep it alive so to make a snapshot to digitize your results of a workshop that's probably a pretty good use of mural if you're already using it if you want to use it on a day-to-day basis you really have to be dedicated and willing to manually shuffle things around but as with all these journey mapping tools my advice is just try them out give them a go and see if they fit your needs mural offers a 30 day free trial and i think the single user license is $12 a month so that's not huge you can easily jump in and just play around with it and see if it if it works for you i'll include the links to mural down below in the show notes if you have any questions about mural that i didn't cover in these two videos make sure to leave a comment and let's continue the conversation over there if you want to learn more about customer journey mapping and how to create maps that actually create an impact check out this playlist over here which is full of videos that are going to help you to do that thanks for watching and see you in the next video