 In this video, you'll learn how to use Miro, formerly known as real-time board and customer journey maps on a day-to-day basis. We're going to look at some of the more advanced features and also end with some of the pros and cons and when you should and shouldn't use Miro. Let's jump straight in. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you build organizations that put people at the heart of their business. And in this video, this video is a second video of a series of two where we are looking at how to use Miro to create customer journey maps. If you haven't seen the first video, check it out over here. We've created the basic structure of our customer journey map. And now we're going to look at using this journey map and Miro on a day-to-day basis to actually realize customer-centric change. So let me share my screen and jump back into the map that we've created in the first video. The map looks like this. It's a super simple map just to show you the basic building blocks of customer journey map. And we're trying to map going to the zoo. Now, probably the first thing that you'll try to do is to move things around in your map. You're going to remove stuff, you're going to add stuff and a good journey mapping tool should make that really easy. Now, Miro has a few options that help you to do that. And let me show you what they are. So let's say in the before stage, we want to add a third customer activity. Let's just copy, park your car and we can just duplicate this. And I don't know, this would be a wait in line to get in. We've added a third card, but now our journey phase doesn't, it's not in the right place. So we can pretty easily drag that around, move it and make the before stage bigger. That's pretty easy. If you want to remove and add stuff, you can pretty easily do that. But how about when we want to add something between buy tickets and park your car somewhere in the middle of the map? Well, Miro makes it really easy to select multiple objects. Sorry, wrong click here. And we also need to change this one, of course, and then just to drag them around a little further. That makes it pretty easy to do that. So you can, you can select multiple stuff, things you can, when you right click, you can, I think you can even group them somewhere. We need to make this one a little bit bigger and smaller. So dragging stuff around, grouping things, aligning things. That's what I really like about Miro. It aligns stuff pretty well. That's pretty easy to do when your map isn't that big. If you don't have that much information in your map, you can do this manually. Once your map starts to become bigger and you have like 25 cards here, and you need to move everything around, it will be a more burdensome task. But it's if you're persistent enough, it's doable. Now, the other thing that's super important in using customer journey maps in day to day operations, that is collaboration. That's that's key. If you're using a tool, customer journey mapping tool, that doesn't allow collaboration. You're just making a nice image. So Miro is really built around collaboration, and you'll have a lot of options. If you click the share button over here, you see you can invite people, you can change them from editing, commenting, viewing. This is basically the same way Google Docs does this, if you're familiar with that, you can invite people from your team, you can invite people from outside of the organization. It's super flexible. And what I really like is you can almost any card option information layer, you can tag people. And you do that, for instance, by this was one of the comments that we placed over here. I could have mentioned a colleague over here. Hey, Chris, take a look at this. And if I would use an ad sign, Chris would get a message. So in terms of collaboration, I think Miro does an excellent, excellent job. The next thing that's super important when you're using a journey map on a day to day basis is sort of knowing the states of something who is working on what is being improved, what is being removed, what has priority in this quarter. And away, there are a few ways to do this in Miro. You can use colors. Most shapes allow you to add a color, like we could make some things purple. And once we know what purple means, we can pretty easily see that. Another option would be to use tags. Tags are almost everywhere in Miro. So we let's make a remove task to these, to these two remove, move tag. We can use this one, right. And now they have the tag on and maybe let's say this one should be improve. And let's make this one green. Like I said, let's make this one improve, green, create. So this makes it pretty easy to see what is what, who is working on what and create priorities. And if you click down below here, you can see, let's find right option. Right. You can see the cards over here. You can see the tags over here. And that makes it pretty easy to sort of navigate and see who's doing what. When you're collaborating on a map, which you always should, the next thing you probably want to know is, did Chris actually do the thing I wanted him to do? I asked him to do or what did he add? What did they change? So the way to do that is by looking at a version history. Miro has this and it's excellent. It's called activity. It's down below over here. And you can see all the changes that have been made to the map since you last log in. And you can, yeah, you can go back, I think even in the map. So this, this might be a subtle thing, but once you start using maps as a day to day tool, this will become crucial. So, and this is really well integrated in Miro. The next thing, at some point, you are going to want to present your map to the management board. And you're not going to do that in an online tool. Probably you might, but you're not. So you'll want to export this map and show pieces of it or the whole thing. And Miro has a few options to do that. You can save it as an image in the free version. You'll get a watermark and you can save it as a high resolution image, but at least you can export it. Now we've got an image and we can save it as a PDF. But first we need to create a frame. We're not going to go into that, but it works and it looks pretty decent. So exporting also is really, really well integrated in Miro. Now let's look at some of the features that I really like about Miro and some of the things I wish that would have been in there and wrap up with sort of looking at when Miro would be suited for you. When would you, when would I recommend that you use Miro? So the first thing we need to get straight is Miro isn't a dedicated customer journey mapping tool. It is a wide boarding tool which allows you to have a lot of flexibility, which is great when you know what you're doing, when you know what the structure is, when you know how to create journey maps. But if you don't know what you're doing, that flexibility could also be a downside. What's also really nice is the embedded icon finder and Google image search. Although again, I recommend you use real images from your research. And overall, I must say that Miro is a pretty polished experience like selecting things, aligning things, the way they handle colors, the way they handle fonts, it just feels done right. And the usability is just, yeah, it's solid. It's a good product to use. And let's not forget the collaboration features. I think, like I said, this is a must have in any professional tool you want to use for customer journey mapping. Miro has done this really well. The sort of different stages where you can share maps like editing, commenting, and viewing. You can tag people, you can view the activity. That's all sort of crucial, I think, for using a journey mapping tool. And that's all embedded into Miro done really well. I think Miro is really good as a journey mapping tool, but it's not perfect. There are two things I wished somehow would have been in there. The first one is has to do with the detail levels. Yes, you can add additional detail to cards using comments or using the card type and adding details there. But when you want to expand and collapse, collapse those details, you would either need to click individual cards, or you would need to go into the overview. There's no real easy way to sort of hide and show lanes and stop lanes. That would be, if that would be the case, it would be perfect. The other thing is that has to do with adding and removing items in your map. Like I showed you, you can group things, select things, lock things that already makes it easy to drag stuff around. But when, if, no, when you will make bigger maps, and you will make bigger maps once you start using them on a database basis, it becomes tedious. At some point, you'll be dragging so much around, you'll be spending so much time realigning things. That is just, I don't see that happening for a long period of time. So, yes, Miro makes it easy to align stuff, but at some point you'll run that will become a limitation. So it would have been nice if things would snap, if you could sort of add things in between, collapse. I know we have to be honest, Miro is a whiteboard, it's not a journey mapping tool. So I know why it's not in there, but it would have been nice. Let's talk about pricing for a second. Miro has a free plan, which I've been using. You can use it, play around and see if it works for you. They also have paid options, of course. And I think the basic option starts at $15 a month, if you pay monthly, and they are also team accounts, stuff like that. Check it out. I'll link to it down below. Now, when would I use Miro as my journey mapping tool if I don't have any other tools? Probably when I'm in a project where the scope is limited, the team is limited, and I know I will be discarding the map after this project, where I know that we won't have to change the map for a long time. But Miro is probably a pretty good choice. It's a solid choice, experience is good. When you would like to create a map that is going to be the foundation of your customer-centric innovation steps for the coming months, where many people need to rally around, where many departments need to rally around, where you need more depth, I think there are better choices out there. But Miro definitely has a good place in the customer journey mapping tools spectrum. I'm pretty excited about Miro. It has surprised me really well. What are your experiences? Have you used Miro as your customer journey mapping tool? What are your tips and tricks for using it? Leave a comment down below. And if you want to continue learning about how to create maps that actually make an impact on your customers and your business, check out this next video because that's what we're going to talk about over there. See you in this next video.