A new way to navigate MURAL.co 🧠🗺
Hello fellow community members! My name’s Josh, and I’m a Senior UX Designer on the web team 👋
While I’m sure many of you are familiar with our product, I’m here today to discuss something else very exciting; our website. The marketing website is a key part of interfacing with every MURAL user, potential or otherwise. That’s why today, we’re excited to share with you all some changes we’re making to our site's navigation.
Previously, our nav was very bare bones, including some links to pages within dropdowns without context. Unless you knew what you were looking for, it was very difficult to understand what nav items meant, where they took you, and what that page might be about. Additionally, it was just a little…. boring.
Well, we’ve fixed that with this latest update! Here’s what we’ve been up to:
- We’ve reconfigured which links live in the nav, surfacing more relevant content and removing things that nobody clicked on
- We’ve added icons and descriptions to each dropdown item, giving context and flair where there wasn’t any before
- We’ve completely redesigned our mobile experience to ensure that it works on 100% of devices
- Lastly, we’re making use of all this new space to showcase templates, blog posts, and other content that is highly relevant to our users
What’s next?
- We’re going to continue to refine this design based on your feedback, adding/removing/arranging the links to best suit your needs
- We want to make it as fun and engaging as possible; it is part of MURAL, after all!
We need your help!
Take a moment to navigate to mural.co and click around! Comment below if our new configuration makes sense for you, if it works on your device, and if you like how it looks! If you don’t like it…. let us know anyway!
I’ll be checking in as your comments come in, to see what y’all are saying, and to share with you any updates and insights we receive. Thanks so much for your involvement, and thanks for being a part of the MURAL Community!
Comments
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Awesome! Thanks for sharing and inviting feedback. (1) the new nav and icons are great, I especially love the featured templates and featured content. (2) It might be just me but I expected to see templates under the resources nav (rather than or in addition to the product nav).
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@josh Thank you for asking. One thing that would be really great to have visible right away is a Search function, with the familiar magnifying glass, so people can quickly put in exactly what they have in mind and get to it a.s.a.p.
Case in point: I heard about Backstage Pass and wanted to find out something about it, but the landing page offered no way to do so. I had to go back out into Google and retrieve it from there.
There are so many treasures in the site - even an entire awesome-looking free e-book, "The Definitive Guide to Facilitating Remote Workshops" - which I have found more by accident than because they are showcased or easy to see. It would be wonderful if someone putting in "e-book" would get to it immediately.
Same thing with someone looking for a quick how-to on any of Mural's functions, like creating a grid (gosh, I wish there was a window where you could just type in the # of rows and columns desired, as per the recent feature suggestion) or a plenary mural that links to others. There are tons of great info pages on this, but no Search window to type in your query and be taken there on the landing page, or even a clear path to all those great How-To's visible before opening any windows (once you get to the Help Center, it's perfect).
I know myself of colleagues who have walked away after one visit because they would have searched "how to set up an account with students" but did not see a Search bar so gave up, just like that.
Looking at things from a user perspective, not everyone is willing to put in the legwork. People's attention spans can be shorter than that of goldfish (not kidding, see: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/), so anything you can do to help people find what they are looking for, FAST, is going to be beneficial to all parties involved.
One last question: is anyone else having trouble downloading said e-book at: https://www.mural.co/ebook?aliId=eyJpIjoiQVY0XC9VNHlySUkxV2RoZzkiLCJ0Ijoiem53Tnl1TkhXblplSFNqdW9BRDZMUT09In0%253D ? I have tried several times but it does not download anything, but just blanks out the areas to be filled in again, and no email arrives either. Not sure if it is just my computer or not. I would love to check that out if there is a way to do so. Thanks!
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@Christina this is an excellent suggestion! We're actively working on Phase 2 of this project, and I totally agree that search (being a typical UI for this sort of thing) would benefit any MURAL user who wants to engage deeper with our 1000+ pages of content! Thanks for this awesome suggestion!
Regarding the ebook, I just checked and it seems to work fine for me! If it helps, you can access our ebook here: https://engage.mural.co/rs/480-LFM-113/images/The%20Definitive%20Guide%20To%20Facilitating%20Remote%20Workshops%20%28V1.5%29.pdf
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@josh Thank you so much, your link works perfectly and the book looks awesome! I look forward to reading it now. Glad to hear you are looking at ways to make it easier for visitors to find all your great stuff - so much of it is applicable across disciplines in ways that might not be obvious at first that a Search function could bring people to something they might have ignored otherwise because they assume it's not in their field, so they have nothing to gain from it. Not true! As a teacher, the interviews on collaboration at work are so useful, for example. I look forward to seeing how it all develops!
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