Tools for remote and hybrid workshop facilitation
Updated February 11, 2023
Digital walls allows you to capture virtual sticky notes, images, and sketches. Use these to support collaboration and capture outcomes during in-person workshops. Or, screenshare to support remote participants or facilitate entire remote workshops.
Digital walls
Mural
Mural allows you to place and move sticky notes, text, images, sketches, documents, flows, and multi-media on a large digital wall. Comes with a built-in library of frameworks (eg: empathy maps, business model canvasses). Invite guests, use built-in templates or create your own. When you join a Mural, you can see other people manipulating the objects. Also allows for comments on objects and dot voting.
Mural offers easy on-boarding, ease of use, and lets you add and populate new sticky notes more quickly than any of the other tools. Mural allows a certain fluidity other tools do not, and that makes it my recommended tool for remote workshops.
Miro
Miro offers the standard sticky notes, text, images, sketches, documents, flows, and multi-media on a large digital wall. Easy guest invites. Miro really shines in the large number of frameworks that allow you to create complex diagrams like mind maps and flows with drag-n-drop efficiency.
Miro is easy to use, though not a easy as Mural. For teams who want to collaborate over the long-term, as opposed to in a workshop or two, the way Miro implements frameworks really supports a team who wants to keep reaching into an easy-to-leverage toolbox. Common of diagrams you need to make by hand in Mural, you point and click to make with Miro.
Screenshot from the Cardboard website..
Cardboard
Born as an online tool to create and maintain user story maps, Cardboard stays razor-focused on simplicity. The name sums it up. Cardboard is designed to let you stick digital cards on a digital board.
Includes sticky note, ways to add organization to the board, connectors, and templates. More focused than Miro and Mural. It does a little less, and that’s probably exactly as much as most teams need.
Screenshot from the Agile Board Hacks website.
Stickies.io
Stickies lets you place, move, and group virtual sticky notes on a virtual wall. Stickies does not allow other forms of content, but it makes it easy to add more “sheets” to a board rather than having to add another board. Grouping sticky notes is pretty cool and unique to Stickies.io. Drop in sticky note on top of another to create a group.
Simple and straightforward to use. And it’s free. If you need a quick place to jump in a work with some sticky notes, Stickies.io is quick and easy.
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Learn more about workshops and collaboration
Collaborative Product Design collects 11 practical tools and hundreds of tips from the trenches that help teams collaborate on strategy, user research, and UX, ideally suited for agile teams and lean organizations.
Visit the book website to learn more or buy on Amazon.