Hacker News Reader

Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently contracting for a corporate client, and my feeling is that "Miro + Teams" is the corporate starter pack.

Freeform looks like Miro or FigJam, and I hate using these types of apps for collaboration. The corporate thought process is: "We're doing remote meetings, so what can we use to replicate the whiteboard in digital form?". But this is the wrong way of thinking. When working remotely, don't just copy and paste analog tools into digital.

When using Miro, I find myself zooming in and out all the fucking time because everyone uses different font sizes. This is much more convenient when you stand in front of a physical whiteboard. It doesn't work with a digital whiteboard. Also, the missing structure makes it almost always an incredible mess. Impossible to find something.

Anyways. Come January I'm done with contracting. Rant over :-)

View on HN

That's because Miro sets the text size relative to the current zoom level... with even a small number of people it suddenly starts to look like a mess.

FigJam and I believe Freeform don't do this. It's insane how Miro scaled so effectively with base UX issues like this.

This is because for some use cases it is very useful to have font size relative to the zoom level.

At my previous startup (AWW, later acquired by Miro) we "solved" this by allowing people to use either relative or absolute font sizes and pen widths, for exactly this reason. I don't have exact numbers, but a large portion of our (vocal) users really wanted either one or the other.

Is this one of those times where you have to make a really tough choice for your customers (ie, not just today’s customers but a larger set of potential future customers)?

Highly vocal users aren’t always the ones you should listen to.

Sure, but they might be the ones paying your salary today. So hard to ignore the group of people who keep you afloat? :)

All the silent ones are perhaps paying the salary, bonus and free food.

We could definitely see both use cases as valid. It's one of those questions that doesn't have a definitive right answer.

A trivial example off the top of my head, zoom-relative widths/sizes are super useful in mind mapping and similar activities where you want to "zoom in" (excuse the pun) to a sub-topic and "zoom-out" to see the overall picture. 1000x zoom is useless if your pen stroke is width of the screen.

A counter example is from GP.

We tried to listen to, but not blindly follow, what our (vocal) users were telling us. I'm stressing "vocal" here not because they were obnoxious - just cognizant of the fact that the silent majority is, well, silent. Hopefully the vocal ones are a good proxy, but that isn't always the case.

This problem is solved by using Frames. They capture and keep everyone at a defined zoom. Always start by drawing a frame, then Miro!

> ..I find myself zooming in and out all the fucking time because everyone uses different font sizes. This is much more convenient when you stand in front of a physical whiteboard.

Interesting point. Physical whiteboard most often has uniform (and readable) font size because of physiology of humans and default stance when writing on a vertical surface.

Digital whiteboard product team should reflect on that and build feature which mimics that.

I think it’s as simple as: a whiteboard has a frame of reference. An infinite canvas doesn’t.

The question is if you are in front of 2 miles wide by 100 ft high whiteboard, would your letter size differ?

In that case, yes, arm length defines text size. But if we all default to 12pt font in a canvas then that’s essentially constrained the same way.

So is the issue that everyone is picking a different font? It’s not even about frame of reference then, maybe. It’s just about a UI guiding behaviour. Maybe label fonts “title” “paragraph” “heading 1” etc. like many apps already seem to do.

> Physical whiteboard most often has uniform (and readable) font size because of physiology of humans and default stance when writing on a vertical surface.

Only if the cohort have roughly similar vision. My vision is roughly one third of the “good” average, so whiteboards have been inaccessible to me my entire life. I used a telescope to read them in school and uni, always had to sit at the fronf… I could do the same at work, but I’d suffer the same “restricted context” problems, at speed.

Digital whiteboards are MUCH better for me. The pan & zoom is awkward, but it’s better than not being able to participate.

Isn't this solved by glasses, most of the time?

Not all vision problems can be corrected by glasses.

You’re right often they do. But we also have people put stickies on the whiteboards and they’re hard to read. It’s not the fault of the whiteboard —-it’s the author who needs to keep this in mind.

Miro isn't a whiteboard, it's a vision board that gets filled by enthusiastic developers at the start of a project and then neglected the rest of the time.

For us FigJam (really similar to Miro) works because we don’t really do asynchronous editing much, most of the time someone prepares the core of it (a screen flow diagram for instance), and during a meeting we iterate through it, discuss and comment the blocs, rearrange as needed.

The main advantage to this approach IMO is the ability to quickly cleanup random bits with approval from the person that wrote them, so you don’t end up with orphans or stuff that clashes with everything else.

In a way it’s really a whiteboard, and it’s “done” once the meeting ends, until the next iteration.

Never heard about Miro but I definitely heard about Teams, and used it. I prefer anything else to it but it works on every OS. This Apple software runs only on Apple devices. I don't even know why they are working on it: if in a team only one person doesn't have a Mac the team will have to use something else, so everyone starts with something else by default.

On teams, I wonder if Apple expects Freeform to be used by corporate clients or if they have another target. Most orgs are office 365 and there’s MS whiteboard and other apps with teams integrations. Maybe they are aiming for something else with this?

Whiteboarding tools are used heavily by students in group projects. Students of today, are workers of tomorrow. So over time it will eat into Miro's userbase. But as with any Apple product since they won't make customisations/features for Enterprise it will never get that far.

O365 'collaboration' is a joke though. That's why all these other alternatives exist. In all the o365 offices I've seen, people end up collaborating on something like Google Docs.

Miro feels more like playing an annoying game than doing anything useful. It’s incredibly annoying to use, I try to avoid it when I can

Reply on news.ycombinator.com