Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
Introduction to Mural
A beginner’s interactive guide to what, why and how .
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Content
- Prerequisites
- Overview of Mural.
- Why use MURAL?
- Key features of Mural.
- How to use Mural
- Mural Setup
- Set up your first Mural canvas
- Explore Mural`s Basic Features
- Navigating the Mural canvas
- Format content on the Mural
- Keyboard and accessibility shortcuts for MURAL
- Creating murals and rooms
- Sharing murals with others
- Conclusion
Introduction
In today's rapidly changing and connected world, teams are often spread across different locations and time zones.
Team collaboration is essential to success, but it can be difficult, especially when members are physically apart.
In this guide, we explore the solution provided by Mural for team collaboration in a connected world. We'll cover what Mural is, why teams use it and provide practical resources.
We'll also answer frequently asked questions and add some fun gifs to make your learning experience interactive.
Content
Easy steps to navigating the what, why and how of Mural including FAQs.
What is Mural
Overview of Mural
2. Why use Mural
Benefits of Mural
Key Features of Mural
3. How to use Mural
Mural Setup
Create a mural account
Set up your first Mural canvas
B. Explore Mural`s Basic Features
Add text, images, and other media
Navigate the Mural Canvas
Format content on the Mural
Keyboard and accessibility shortcuts for MURAl
Creating murals and rooms
Sharing murals with others
- Conclusion
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this guide, you should have basic computer knowledge. To use Mural, you need to create a Mural account. A stable internet connection is essential to access and collaborate on murals. Make sure your device meets the minimum system requirements for the browser you're using.
What is Mural?
The word ‘‘mural‘‘ typically brings to mind a magnificent artwork painted on a wall, adding vibrancy and creativity to the surroundings.
Unlike physical walls, in this guide, we're exploring another kind of mural: "MURAL." MURAL provides a digital space where teams can come together to brainstorm, plan projects, and share ideas visually.
It's a unique platform that enables teams to collaborate in real-time, bringing their creativity to life in a virtual environment.
Overview of Mural.
Mural is an online visual collaboration space that enables teams to brainstorm, plan, and collaborate effectively, even in remote work environments.
It offers real-time collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work on the same mural simultaneously.
Mural provides a customizable workspace with templates and facilitation tools, catering to various industries and use cases.
It supports project planning, design collaboration, and agile workflows. Additionally, Mural facilitates virtual workshops, team-building activities, and remote presentations. With its versatile features, remote accessibility, and emphasis on visual collaboration, Mural empowers teams to communicate, ideate, and innovate seamlessly.
To broaden your understanding watch this video that is less than 2 minutes on What is MURAL
Why use MURAL?
Mural is the go-to tool embraced by teams worldwide. It enables you to step into a safe and captivating realm where innovation thrives, communication soars, and ideas flow freely. These are a few uses of MURALl.
Brainstorming: Engage in creative idea-generation sessions.
Process Mapping and Diagramming: Visualize and analyze workflows and systems.
Product and Service Design: Develop innovative and user-centric products and services.
Research and Journey Mapping: Conduct in-depth research and map out customer experiences.
Teaching and Presentation: Deliver informative and engaging presentations or training sessions.
All these are the user advantage that mural provides
Benefits of Mural.
Let's explore the remarkable benefits and key features of Mural that empower teams to collaborate visually, enhance creativity, streamline workflows, and foster seamless remote teamwork.
Enhanced Collaboration.
Visual Engagement:
Organized and Structured Work
Creativity and Innovation
Remote teamwork
Flexibility and Customization
Seamless integrations
Key features of Mural.
Most interactively and engagingly, let's explore the most important features of Mural.
Virtual Canvas: Let's do a short exercise, Picture a digital playground of creativity and collaboration. That's what Mural is. Team members can add text, images, sticky notes, shapes, and drawing data.
Facilitation Tools: Mural offers practical facilitation tools like timers, voting systems, icebreakers, and virtual sticky notes.
Integrations: Mural merges well with other Applications! you can seamlessly integrate with popular tools and platforms like Jira, Trello, Google Drive, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to supercharge your workflow.
Customization and Flexibility: Mural's customization and flexibility provide a platform to unleash your inner artist.
You can transform the canvas to reflect your unique style by working with customizable layouts, vibrant color palettes, and expressive icons.
Communication and Notifications: With Mural you are sure to Stay seamlessly connected and in the know with Mural's communication and notification features.
Engage in vibrant discussions and idea-sharing with built-in chat and video conferencing capabilities, all within the platform.
Be the first to catch updates and stay on top of activities with timely notifications, ensuring you never miss a beat in your collaborative journey.
Privacy and Security: Mural provides a platform for you to rest easy and focus on your collaboration, as Mural takes your data security and privacy seriously. With robust features like access controls, guest permissions, and adherence to industry standards, Mural ensures the safety and confidentiality of your team's collaborative efforts. So, let go of worries and immerse yourself in the creative journey, knowing that Mural has your back when it comes to privacy and security.
How to use Mural
In this section, you will be creating your account, where you'll set up our very first canvas to unleash your collaborative prowess. Get ready to dive into a world of visual collaboration and watch your ideas come to life on Mural's virtual canvas.
Mural Setup
Have you ever asked yourself “How do I sign up for a Mural account?” Let us dive right into our setup and answer this question.
Create an account.
To create an account on Mural follow these easy steps
Visit MURAL and sign up for an account.
Verify that you are human and not a Robot
Verify your Email address
Create a Password
Congratulations on these easy steps you have created your first mural account, let's go right ahead and set up our first mural canvas.
Set up your first Mural canvas
As beginners, we may have personal questions like “How do I create my first mural canvas” Let's dive right into the creation of our first mural canvas
- Name your workspace after creation; you can optionally invite team members immediately or do that after the creation. kindly go through mural's terms of service and accept if you are comfortable with it, accept it, click on save and continue
- You can go further by personalizing it by choosing the category of your team and your role title and then clicking on continue.
You can select an infinite blank canvas or a resizable blank canvas to start from. Or, you can choose one of the listed templates, on the left of your screen, which always opens on an infinite canvas.
Go ahead to click on the create mural button on the bottom right of the webpage
As soon as you access your new mural, you can begin contributing ideas to your canvas or invite other collaborators to join and kickstart the process.
Explore Mural`s Basic Features
Beginners always ask questions like “What are the different objects I can add to my mural and how do I use them?”
Let's inspect this canvas together carefully.
When you open a mural, the canvas takes center stage on your screen, offering a blank space for your creative expression.
Whether you start with a template or begin from scratch, the canvas becomes a playground for your brilliant experiments, enabling you to add texts, images, and sticky notes.
Within this expansive space, you'll find various sections to explore and utilize for your creativity.
Let's carefully observe the features of this canvas. Let's dive right into explaining what the different objects are and how to use them
Indicator | Features | Uses |
1 | The Mural title | Take control of your mural's title by easily adding or modifying it. Expand the dropdown menu to unlock additional options, such as marking the mural as a favorite or creating a duplicate. Furthermore, conveniently located within the menu, you'll discover the undo and redo buttons, providing you with seamless revision control for a hassle-free editing experience. |
2 | The left sidebar menu | The sidebar menu is your go-to tool for seamlessly adding objects to the canvas, acting as the essential building blocks of your mural. These objects encompass a wide range of elements, including sticky notes, headers and paragraphs, images, GIFs, icons, and more. With a simple click on the respective object's icon, you can effortlessly explore and access its options to enhance your creative process. |
3 | The Share Button | To initiate collaboration and invite others to join you on the canvas, simply click the prominent red Share button. This action opens the Share mural modal, allowing you to effortlessly extend invitations to potential collaborators. Additionally, you can conveniently access a list of current collaborators who have access to your mural by clicking the person icon situated next to the Share button. |
4 | Facilitation Features | If you are a facilitator (automatically granted if you created the mural), you'll have access to these exclusive features. Facilitation Features include voting sessions, laser pointer, private mode, and more, empowering you to enhance collaboration and facilitation within the mural. |
5 | Avatar and User Options | At any time, clicking your avatar opens a menu of user options, granting access to profile settings, navigation preferences, and more, allowing you to customize your Mural experience. |
6 | Collaborator Avatars | The avatar bar displays the avatars of individuals currently present in your mural, providing real-time visibility of active participants. Clicking on a person's avatar presents various interaction options, while the smiley face icon enables engagement with reactions if they are enabled in your mural. |
Sigh, what an illustration! Let's move ahead, Go ahead and explore and experiment with these features. With these helpful resources.
Navigating the Mural canvas
This gif typically explains how beginners think navigating Mural would feel like. Beginners have questions like “How do I navigate and move around the canvas effectively?”
Let’s answer that question now by diving right into it.
Navigating the Mural canvas is like embarking on an exciting adventure filled with limitless possibilities. As you delve into this immersive digital space, you'll discover various intuitive features that make exploration effortless.
Let’s dive into this short video to expose you to navigating the mural canvas. I promise to keep this fun click on this link to watch this short clip on navigating the mural canvas
Format content on the Mural
Oftentimes, We want to add certain colors, define size and enhance images but beginners find it hard and have this question “ How can I customize the layout and appearance of my mural?”
Let’s discuss why and how to solve this problem ;
Formatting your content on Mural offers practical and aesthetic advantages. By formatting text, images, and elements, you enhance readability, emphasize key points, and create an appealing visual canvas. Utilizing options like fonts, colors, and sizes, you can effectively organize information, highlight important details, and maintain consistency. These formatting features improve comprehension, grab attention, and enhance the overall presentation of your content on Mural. click here to watch this video that is less than 2mins on how to format content on Mural
Keyboard and accessibility shortcuts for MURAL
A FAQ by beginners mostly is “Are there any keyboard shortcuts available in Mural?”
The answer is YES, Let's dive right in.
Experience the power of MURAL`s keyboard shortcuts and accessibility features. These shortcuts make it faster and more convenient to perform a variety of actions, from navigating the canvas to managing objects to simply collaborating. Unleash the full potential of MURAL with these time-saving shortcuts for a smoother, more efficient creative experience. click here to watch this video that is less than 3 minutes to learn about shortcuts for MURAL.
Creating murals and rooms
Another FAQ is “What is the purpose of creating murals and rooms in Mural?”
Creating murals and rooms improves communication, fosters creativity, and enables teams to achieve shared goals in immersive and collaborative digital spaces.
Murals and rooms offer numerous benefits for collaboration and creativity. They provide a visual and organized platform to bring together diverse perspectives and ideas.
With murals, you can brainstorm, visualize concepts, and strategize, fostering innovation and problem-solving. Collaborators can seamlessly contribute and iterate in real time, regardless of location. Rooms enable the grouping of related projects or teams, ensuring efficient organization and easy access. click here to watch this video that is less than 3 minutes to learn about creating MURAL. And rooms
Sharing murals with others
The very essence of MURAL is collaboration and Beginners have questions like “How do I collaborate with others in real-time on a mural?” Let's dive right into it.
Sharing murals with others is crucial for collaboration and brings numerous benefits.
It allows you to invite others to view and contribute to your creative projects, fostering seamless communication and teamwork.
Stakeholders and clients gain transparency into project progress, aiding coordination and decision-making.
Sharing murals also bring in diverse perspectives and valuable insights, enhancing creativity and knowledge sharing. Ultimately, this collaborative approach leads to more successful outcomes in your projects.
Conclusion
Congratulations! We've embarked on an exhilarating journey exploring the captivating world of Mural and its remarkable benefits for visual collaboration.
Together, we've discovered the art of creating captivating murals and rooms, igniting effective communication and unlocking the true potential of creativity.
Excitingly, we've delved into the power of sharing murals, unveiling transparency and embracing diverse perspectives that spark the flames of successful collaboration.
But wait, there's more! We've dived deep into the treasure trove of key features, from the awe-inspiring virtual canvas to the empowering facilitation tools, integrations, and customizable options that unleash your imagination.
And the adventure doesn't stop there! We've mastered the art of navigating Mural, harnessing the magic of formatting, shortcuts, and accessibility features that elevate the user experience to soaring heights.
So, my fellow explorers, let's keep pushing boundaries, fueling our creativity, and utilizing the abundant resources at our fingertips.
Together, we'll unleash a symphony of innovation and collaboration in this dynamic digital realm. Thank you for joining me on this exciting journey, and remember to connect with me on my social media platforms for engaging in discussions, suggestions, and interactions. Let's continue to ignite the spark of inspiration and shape the future of visual collaboration!