💡Feature Idea: Create Subfolders for a Rooms Hierarchy
😢 Customer Problem Statement 😢
I am an employee in a large organization
I am trying to use mural to organize mine and my team's project work in MURAL
But I cant seem to find what I am looking for easily
Because I am working on multiple projects that all have meeting notes, project plans, design sprints and other similar artifacts
Which makes me feel lost, disorganized and like I need to continue to keep a majority of work in Google Drive
🎉 Ideal State 🎉
In a perfect world my team and I are always able to easily access any artifact or working document we need immediately
The biggest benefit to me is I can now have a single source of truth while working on multiple projects
Which makes me feel in control, efficient and organized
💡 Proposed Idea 💡
Create a rooms hierarchy to be able to organize workspaces into teams and then projects.
Example: Workspace: Intuit - Room: Central Innovation - Subfolder: Project X - Board: Project Kickoff
Comments
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@Nico thank you so much for this clear idea and the problem statement! Appreciate it!🔥 Can't wait to hear other peoples' thoughts.
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I've been hoping for folders for quite a while now and I really hope the Mural developers implement this feature!
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Came here specifically for this reason. Please make this happen!
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Great idea! I thought same several times
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Yes I desperately need this so I can organize my murals by project in my room. I work in a large organization so creating rooms as my organization system is not feasible or helpful. I work across many project teams at a time and have multiple murals for each.
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2 years into Mural usage at my company and Mural is showing its age with the organization.
My squad has a room with 50+ murals and its very hard to find anything, need folders or tagging to group them in a room
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I think this post has identified a real problem but proposes the wrong solution. I would be concerned about adding an extra layer in between users and their murals. User-generated folder structures often convolute things. Their usability heavily depends on users to make good decisions—and we don't always do so.
However, I do see the need for more tools to organize and navigate inside rooms that are full of murals. I do not think MURAL's product team should look at this and say, "Well just create extra rooms," because that just passes the buck onto rooms, and then it's "Well just create more workspaces" etc. Creating extra rooms requires re-inviting people, setting up permissions again, etc.
"Archive" is a good example of a feature for cleaning up rooms without adding sub-folders, but it does not address the need raised here.
MURAL needs to look out for folks who produce a lot of murals in one room. If it hasn't been done yet, I would love to see MURAL do a deep dive research and design study to understand:
- What are rooms used for? How does this differ from MURAL's assumptions about rooms?
- How many murals per room? What are the extremes?
- Does anyone really need 50+ murals in a room?
- If so, what is the best way to help people navigate rooms with a lot of murals? @derekmahlitz is probably onto something with tags. Existing metadata such as dates, owners, and contributors could help sort/filter/group, too. Pinning is a fan favorite from Slack and SharePoint.
- If not, how can the product facilitate "room cleanup"? (An analogous example would be Slackbot saying, "Hey, no one uses this channel anymore, want to archive it?")
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@Nico do your company's administrators allow you to use more than one workspace? Assuming you really are at Intuit, I can imagine there are tons of people using MURAL.
Admittedly, MURAL's company administration toolkit is not ready for enterprise primetime in my view. (It lacks centralized provisioning, which is essential for some big organizations.)
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Here is my understanding of the structure:
- Slack :: MURAL :: SharePoint
- Grid :: Company :: Company
- Team :: Workspace :: Site
- Channel :: Room :: Folder
- Message :: Mural :: File
The question is, does MURAL want to be more like SharePoint (infinite sub-folders allowed) or Slack (no sub-channels allowed)?
I guess you could argue that Slack threads are like SharePoint sub-folders, so there is space for another level in the hierarchy. But you can see threads and channels side by side in the same view.
I suppose if MURAL allowed 1 layer of sub-folder than expanded accordion-style into the room—instead of taking you into the sub-folder—then you might not overly complicate it. Maybe there is an interaction design way to make sub-folders work after all...
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As a teacher, my case is a little different than those in the above posts.
I am the kind of user that has one workspace but a room for each class in it.
My colleagues share the workspace but have their own rooms for their own classes, and each of us share the situation of having one admin per room.
We share them with our students, and would like them to see things in a certain order.
In this case, none of the above recommendations would be necessary or helpful.
What IS needed is a way to be able to organize those murals within each room in the order I want them to be in. And yes, it is absolutely as needed and as easy to have 50+ murals in a room as it is to have 50+ docs in a Word or Excel folder.
Ideal state: simply have organization options in the same way as Word or Excel, i.e. keep being able to see them in the order of last date used, the default in Mural, but with the added option of seeing them alphabetically arranged. This would allow us to control the order by simply putting a number at the start of the mural title, which we could change as needed. It would also be great to have a search function to find one fast within a room and within a workspace.
I LOVE using Mural but scrolling through all the ones I've created to find the right one is a real pain point. It would be great to not have that Where Is That Thing?!? voice shouting in my head anymore. Especially when I'm already late for class! :-)
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The first step for me is to add a toggle for viewing a room in 1)Tile view (default now) or 2)List view (just with title, no pic) like file explorer does in Windows. Easy Peasy 👍️
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Also, look at bookmarks in a browser, I don't think anybody just creates them in 1 long list of 100's, they have a folder system for easy usage.
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Wow! Woke up to some great ideas and pushes for different visions for the same customer pain. Makes me realize that as great as an 'Idea Forum" is, it might be more beneficial to have a "Customer Problem/Pain" forum. While I am not sure my idea is the "right" idea, I believe none of these are right or wrong until MURAL is able to run some rapid experiments and prototypes to get actual user behavior.
Appreciate the pushback all!
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Hey everyone! We are already testing a solution to this problem. Your feedback is really helpful so keep it coming. You will be able to try our solution really soon 😀
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@derekmahlitz Oh, I have folders in my browser bookmarks, but they are a pain because I wished more for tags or so, thus making things being able to be in several "collections" by topic and not just in one folder.
Therefore it would be cool if Mural had tags for murals, too ;-) To search by tags or create something like "intelligent folders" that contain search results to a defined search, e.g. "<project A>" would show all the murals that have the tag "Project A".
Could become tricky to give authorizations to it (on a "intelligent collection" instead of a "room"?), but it might be a different approach to solve the same problem "getting things organized to find stuff and to share access". Just an impulse in my mind right now.
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@Nico : Absolutely agree. I love imagining features, but basically Mural wants to better understand our pains here and probably (as in all of user research) our first impulse might not be the best solution to solve the issue and to clearly talk and discuss "issues and pains" instead of different solution ideas, would be very helpful to dig deeper to the cause instead of the symptom :-)
So, great proposal by you! I really appreciate it!
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@Agus Any opportunity to see an early version for feedback? even screenshot?
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@manuel I like that idea, maybe v1 is folders, v2 with tags
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Hey @derekmahlitz so grateful and excited that you want to give feedback. I am checking on your request, and I will DM some information shortly.
We actually look for people who want to give feedback in the forums on a pretty regular basis. Current openings can be found under the tag, "Open MURAL Research."
Thanks again. I know this is a feature I am super excited about too.
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A new "Folders" in "Rooms" feature seems to be rolling out now :-) Wooohooooo.
You can create folders in "rooms" now and move murals via drag & drop to there.
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I saw this yesterday! Amazing. Christmas came early this year ha!
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Hey hey! Just wanted to share a bit more about Folders with this group which we rolled out yesterday.
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