👀 Poll: How do you use MURAL for research?

[Deleted User]

Research and MURAL are best friends. 🐶🐱 There are many different way's you can use MURAL to support your research initiatives. 🔍️

Some of our favs:

1. Building research initiatives in MURAL makes the invisible. 💪
2. At Zapier they use MURAL to synthesize research, which help make sure that the decisions that are made are both good for the company and the customers.
3. O'Reilly Media conduct card sorting research in MURAL. Compared to other dedicated card sorting tools, with MURAL they got more flexibility in the questions they could ask.

So, are you using MURAL for research? If so, how and why? If not, what do you use and why?

[Deleted User]

@Emilia, I think using MURAL for research and validation has been the best surprise. Recently (stay tuned for some slight updates), I shared a mock up of a new design for the community home page in a mural using screenshots. I gathered feedback, and we came to agreement quickly and effortlessly.

Being able to have a fast way to show what I meant, allowed us to move towards a final v2 version seamlessly.

nicole_ger

One of the biggest ways I use mural as a researcher is for data analysis after a research study. When working in the office I really liked covering the wall with different colored sticky notes and moving them around to visually see the patterns. Now that I work remotely that's not as feasible. 😂 So I use a mural board as a substitute.

I'm also testing out right now doing an expert review of a design with a mural board so I'm excited to see if this idea pans out. I've taken screenshots of the experience and used those to map out the flow. I then am going to go in and add comments, questions, and concerns throughout the screenshots and flow. Not the most conventional way of doing it, but I wanted to test it out!

ryannee

@nicole_ger Hey Nicole! That's a great way to critique new designs, or have someone reflect on screenshots of an existing experience. I like to provide color-coded sticky notes for:

• Roses / positive things / "I like..." / pink sticky notes

• Thorns / negative things / "I don't like..." or "I worry about..." / blue sticky notes

• Buds / ideas or areas with potential / "An idea I have is..." or "I wonder..." / green sticky notes

• Questions / yellow sticky notes

As far as research goes, I've had success doing the same color-coding of notes after a research study too. After color-coding all of the notes and direct quotes, I'll cluster the sticky notes into themes and try to write a sentence-like label that describes the underlying sticky notes in that theme. If the themes are described well, the mural becomes a pretty great research synthesis without having to create a separate document.

Sometimes people use vague, one-word cluster labels like "technology" or "sales," which loses a lot of the nuance from the research. For example, if a cluster has a mixture of positive and negative notes, the sentence can describe that tension. Sentence-like labels are the way to go!