We updated the design of our UI. What do you think?
MURAL has a new look and feel today. ✨ We’re excited to share the latest updates to our product design!
We’d love to hear what you think about it. 🧠
At MURAL, we dream big: 🚀 MURAL will become more inclusive, more accessible, and more cross-functional over time. This UI update is our next step to making that BIG dream a reality.
With this update, we aimed to make style changes that improve accessibility and make MURAL easier and more fun to use.
Some changes you may notice. We --
- Made it brighter with a lighter color theme.💡
- Enhanced readability and usability through increased contrast and whitespace as well as improved text styling.📖
- Built a foundation for further accessibility enhancements. 🤩
More enhancements are coming your way in the future.
So, what do you think? Do you like the new look and feel? Tell us why (or why not) below. We would love to chat! Our Product team is waiting eagerly to discuss the updates with you. Thank you in advance for the help! 🎆
Comments
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Thanks Nicole! Looking forward to seeing all the feedback too!
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Thank you MURAL for the refreshing look and feel. I was indeed surprised today.
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For me the new GUI has no importance. Ok, it looks a little more cleaner, but this was no issue in the old one.
INMO, the upgrade was a waste of effort, which should be better spent in improving functionalities that work incomplete or are missing since Mural started: text formating in post-its and text-blocks: proper/nice formatting enhances understanding of board content tremendously! -- alphabetical sorting of murals --- fixing accessibility issues via IPad --- developing an Android app --- and much more.
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@nicolenearhood While I agree that all the things mentioned by @MichaelT are also important, first impressions are key, and obviously enhancing that first-time experience is as important as improving what is already there for those of us already using the product - I am sure you guys are working on both, that is just not what your specific post up here happened to be about this time. That said, now that you have these extremely visually appealing illustrations:
on the landing page, which I hadn't seen before, it would be great if they were clickable - I keep clicking on them thinking they will lead to something and then feel disappointed because they make me want to learn more about what you mean with each one.
Also, the pale-blue-and-pink-dot background Mural often uses is soooo nice... and it would be awesome to have it as one of the background options. Speaking of background options, this is an area I would recommend you consider adding a couple to that are subtle enough (like the dots) to fit in anywhere, but clearly unique to Mural. A good background like that would be a company signature and free PR in a way that a white or grey background is not.
On that note, let me say that you may also want to consider adding the other Mural-ly images to your options, for example as a template with adjustable Mural shapes and icons, or automatically in the Content Library section. I have wondered SO often while enjoying your many web pages and webinars, where do they get all those awesome icons, images and shapes? I am so happy to see many of them on the excellent syllabus builder for teachers and pre-course Museum for students that are in the works. Great stuff!
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@MichaelT Thank you for your feedback. Your question is a great one: why did we prioritize the new UI now? I want to provide a bit more color on that. I'm a product marketer, and I'm always impressed by the difficult trade-offs that product managers have to make.
The primary purpose of the UI enhancement was to lay the groundwork for further enhancements to the UI and to make progress against our goal of making MURAL an accessible product. The heavy lift here was on the backend, and we took the opportunity to modernize the UI. Plus, we hadn't done a UI facelift since 2016. 😆
I hear your desire to have more functionality in MURAL. As a power user of MURAL, I want to do more in it everyday. The good news is that all of the items you listed above are on our actively being worked on! I can't go into too much depth, but you'll be quite happy with enhancements coming over the next 1-3 months.
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@Christina Thanks for the love. You're going to make our graphic designers 😊.
I love these ideas for the icons and backgrounds. I'm going to share your feedback with the marketing team, product team (for backgrounds), and the templates team.
We really appreciate this kind of feedback! 😍
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I love the new design and like others said, it's very refreshing to see different categories on the homepage. My only comments are any if there's chance of a dark mode 😁and where the user account option (used to be bottom left) is. Other than those small things, great work all!
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@jackdong Dark mode! ⚫️ Great question/suggestion! I'll let @Thomas chime in on it that is something the Product Team would consider in the future.
You can always add your ideas to make MURAL better for you in our Feature Ideas category as well! And of course in the meantime you are welcome to work around this by changing your background color. 👍
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Why did you remove the "Favorite Murals" section from the main menu? It was my main way to navigate to boards that I am regularly working on and that are spread across many different rooms. 😔
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Hello @amjec! Thank you for the feedback. While "Favorite Murals" is no longer in the main menu, it is now on the dashboard. Our product team got your feedback.
If you would like to see what other members think, please submit a Feature Idea. 💡
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Looks great however as a visitor, the element options are missing for me... e.g. when I select a sticky note, I can't change the color or size etc...
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@swidnikk, thank you for this question. We actually have a similar one asked yesterday in our Technical Q&A. Our Support team should be in touch soon! You can bookmark that question and check back for an answer!
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You've made the best update so far – Duplicate works as it should. But Mural is still way behind Miro in terms of basic usability. Why don't you implement these all familiar shortcuts – T for Text, R for Rectangle, V for Select tool etc. That's so obvious and will hugely improve the UX. Mural also lacks frames (like Miro and Figma), file integrations, clean and comprehensive template libraries and other handy stuff that Miro has been having from the very start. Not to mention this ridiculous PDF export via email. That said – you're getting there, but still too far off
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts @mg18! We appreciate it and value the time you're taking to help us make MURAL even better for everybody.
We're working tirelessly to enhance MURAL. For example, early this year we released a significant enhancement to our diagramming and mapping capabilities (more coming soon on this too). As you probably know, in product you must make tradeoffs. One area that we've invested heavily is empowering facilitators and meeting leaders to get more out of their meetings and workshops, by giving them the ability to control and guide the experience to get better engagement, uncover unique ideas and solutions, and drive to decision.
Thanks again, and we'll be in touch.
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I love Mural and we use it all day long! It would have been great to provide feedback and input when these changes were being considered, rather than being surprised (and not particularly delighted) with the update. A few specifics to consider for future enhancements:
- The new "Murals" page is not useful. It only shows 6 recently opened, favorites, or recently modified. We typically work with a lot more than 6 so this means now we have to click "See all recently opened murals" to get to the page we really need to see with all of our recently modified murals. That's a lot of clicking, mouse moving, and scrolling we didn't have to do before. Usability has decreased with the new UI.
- The dark nav pane with light text was nice because it was more visually distinct from the rest of the page so it was less cognitive effort to visually acquire and scan the content of the nav pane. (Seems like it was also more compact. There is a lot of unnecessary whitespace between items in the nav pane now so it feels more like visual "hopping" than scanning.)
- User preference to choose a dark background (like Adobe products) would be FANTASTIC! Dark backgrounds are so much easier on the eyes when trying to focus on content, and spending significant amounts of time in the product each day. Alternatively, if the default were a dark background that would be even better!
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@d9tech, thank you so much for this very thorough feedback. Product is busy gathering feedback on the update, and we appreciate the specific feedback very much. Ww know it takes time to tell us what you think, and we cannot thank you enough for taking it.
Product actively looks for people to help test new updates. A lot of times these opportunities are posted in our feature ideas category on the forum. As an example, one of our members is chatting with @nadiar, one of our product managers, about textboxes. If you are interested in these types of opportunities chatting there is a great place to stay plugged in.
I like the idea of switching between dark and light modes as a user preference. I know for me I tend to be a dark mode person. 🦇It looks like this hasn't been suggested yet, so if you are interested, please submit a feature idea for other members to vote on it.
Thanks again!
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![[Deleted User]](https://community.mural.co/applications/dashboard/design/images/defaulticon.png)
