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Create and publish your own templates

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 min

Create and publish your own templates

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Order activities to meet outcomes

Help others understand what goals can they achieve.

Define an approach for building a template with a clear flow
Order methods in a template to get a team to a desired result

Building templates with purpose

Teams use MURAL to work through challenges together. Your template could have exactly what a MURAL member needs to solve challenges and innovate. Before you begin to build your template, make sure you’ve defined why your template exists.

Ask these key questions to set up for success:

  • What challenge does the template help you and others overcome? 
  • What's the intent? 
  • Who's the typical user or audience for this process?

Describe your template

Once you identify the purpose, summarize it with a short description that introduces your template to that audience. In this summary, ask yourself: why should someone care to use this method? What’s the benefit this template provides to the audience?

This description will belong at the top left of your template to inform the audience when they preview your template in the library.

Need inspiration? 

Here are a few examples to spark your inspiration:

Work Life Impact Play Template by Atlassian

The Work Life Impact "Play" is a workshop created by Atlassian as a way to build empathy and identify the right support for your team through changing work experiences.

The Lean Procurement Canvas

Use the Lean Procurement Canvas to source a new partner/service/product, set up a new agile product development team, assess an existing partnership, and manage your partnership.

Rapid Mind Mapping

Rapidly map your ideas, observations or projects and uncover new perspectives and connections.

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(upbeat music)

When designing a template, I usually start with a desired outcome and then work backwards to see what steps I need to take in order to achieve my desired outcome. For example, if I want to know what to do next in a project, I might start with identifying what are the challenges servants are facing right now? What is preventing us from moving forward? 

Then generates, a couple of ideas for solutions on how we might overcome those challenges. We can prioritize those ideas to define which one would have the biggest impact and with the least effort. And then we should end up with a list of action items that will help us achieve our goal. So, start thinking about what the desired outcome should be over your template. 

Think about what the goals you want to deliver but also think about the specific artifacts. What is the actual content you would like to have at the end of completing the activities? Each template is designed to help you achieve a different intention or different outcome. Let's look at a couple of them and discuss what those might be. 

The Get to the Bottom of the Stack Template is created to help you generate a large quantity of ideas in a short amount of time. And the outcome you would have after finishing this template would be the ideas that you came up with. The Blueprint Template is created to help you understand your customer's experience with your service or product and help you identify where the pinpoints are so that you can improve and come up with some ideas for actionable solutions. 

The outcome of the Project Planning Template is to help your team align on what the goal of your project is, how you would measure success, who will participate and what the costs are. The goal of the Product Planning Template is to help your team align on what the project goals should be, how you will measure success, who will participate, cost and other key items that you need to consider when planning for a project.

Get to know the canvas

Build collaborative spaces on the canvas and adjust it to fit your needs.

Use canvas freely
Format the properties of the canvas in your murals

What is the canvas?

Within the mural, the canvas is the space where you and your team will collaborate. Remember collaborative sessions in person? This is the equivalent of your whiteboard or flipchart paper. You and your collaborators can add content to the canvas within your mural. Each mural has one canvas that you can modify to meet the needs for your meeting.

When you create a new mural, the canvas starts at a default size. However, you can change the size and color of the canvas to fit your design specifications and style.

To change the size of the canvas:

  1. Enter the mural
  2. Right-click on a blank part of the canvas
  3. Select Edit Mural Size
  4. Choose to extend the canvas horizontally, vertically, or choose your own custom size
  5. Click Save

Make content stand out with a different background color. To change the color of the canvas: 

  1. Click the drop-down menu next to the mural’s name 
  2. Select Mural settings
  3. Choose a background color and press Save

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Hello there, Daniela here, let's talk about canvases. A Canvas is this surface upon which you will create your murals. So let's build one together, I'm going to click on the plus sign that says Create new mural and I'm going to choose blank mural. Once we do that, it will take us to a blank surface. And that is our canvas. And now I can choose different sizes for my canvas and even different background colors. So if I go to the drop down menu that is next to the title, I will be able to go under mural settings and choose my background color. And I'll go with default size for this time. So once again, the canvas is this surface upon which you will create all A wonderful content that you will be ready to share with the world. So get your canvases ready, create wonderful content and start collaborating.


Add titles and text boxes

Structure content on the mural into organized sections.

Differentiate between a title and textbox
Add titles and text boxes to a mural
Customize titles and text boxes with colors and sizes

When to use a title versus a text box?

Titles are great for separating different sections within a mural. They are usually bigger compared to a text box. You can add more texts with text boxes, including paragraphs, to explain a concept in detail. You definitely can’t do this with sticky notes designed to take smaller amounts of words.

How to add titles and text boxes

How can you bring more life to your canvas with titles and text boxes? Here are some simple steps to help you get started.

  1. Check the left tool for the first icon. Click this, and it reveals icons for the title and text box
  2. Click and drag Title or text box onto the canvas
  3. To edit the title and text box, select the object you want to edit. A formatting menu appears next to the object.
  4. Use the formatting menu to edit the font, color, background and text size. You can also add links to your title or text box to navigate collaborators to other content.

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Hi there, Lindsey here, and I'm going to show you how to add titles and text boxes. To add a title or a text box, look at the left hand side menu. And in the first menu here in text, we have titles and text boxes. Now to add a title or a text box, click and drag them over into the mural canvas. This one's a title, so we can call this introduction. I can make the title bigger, I can change the color, I can pick purple, and I can make it bold. Again, I can pick that purple color, I can do a handful of different things. Now that I have my title to bring a text box, I just click and drag in a textbox. You'll notice that the textbox is a little bit smaller. Subtitles are used for different separating different sections or a different title within your mural. And then text boxes are for maybe when you want to add more text or say with introduction, this might include my instructions. So step one, open the mural. And so you can make you can make textboxes, wider or skinnier, depending what you're looking to do. The difference for when you might use a textbox versus a save maybe a sticky note and you'll notice you can switch types here on the end is sticky notes are great for when you have a certain smaller amount of words, right with the text boxes. If you need to add a paragraph or you need to add longer amounts of text. That's an instance when you might use a text box. I like to use text boxes for instructions like This and then I'll even sometimes add in an icon to show a list of steps. So now I have my title, introduction. And then I have my instructions. And I can do again I can duplicate and now I can have multiple step one, maybe step two is add a title, and textbox. Perfect, and then I can drag over my number a little number two. So now you've been able to see how to add a title and a text box to a mural.

Build out activities

Design and use the space efficiently for all the activities in your session.

Save time building out your template using frameworks
Cluster and group ideas
Duplicate and reuse content

Save time with frameworks and areas

Frameworks contain a variety of pre-formatted activities that you can use for your templates. You can browse these activities and use them to build your visual space. Many of these frameworks also have powerful visual analogies you can use to support the conversation.

Group information together with areas

Another great way to cluster ideas and group information is to use areas. If participants are brainstorming in one activity, you can drag similar thoughts in sticky notes to place them together. Plus, you can use different colors for sticky notes to label and identify similar ideas.

Build once, then duplicate

When you’re building content in the mural, you can create one section and duplicate the objects to quickly design the entire working space and re-format to fit your needs. Use these keyboard shortcuts to duplicate objects in the mural. 

  • Duplicate content: CTRL + D or ALT + DRAG
  • Multiple select content: Hold CTRL + Click
  • Multiple selection marquee: SHIFT + Drag 

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(upbeat music) 

Okay, next let's look at how we can design the space for the rest of the activities. Another tip I wanted to share is to always look in the frameworks menu, if you can find any pre-formatted activities that you can use for your templates. So in the frameworks menu, you will find basic frameworks such as layouts, you have free form area, a grid area. 

We also have a two by two grid, lines We can also find design frameworks with personas, roadmaps, et cetera, some Agile frameworks. We can find Kanban boards, retrospective, and so on. And there are also some business frameworks and calendars here as well. I wanted to start the session with a check-in and one of my favorite activities for check-in is what's on your radar. So let's go to the LUMA tab here in the frameworks section, and let's see if we can find the “what's on your radar” framework. In order to add a framework to the mural, you can just drag and drop it onto the canvas. The frameworks come in a default size, but you might want to see if you need to resize it for the amount of participants that are going to join your session. 

So, in order to kind of calculate how much space you need for each of the activities, I'm going to add a couple of placeholder stickies to help me design the space and evaluate how much space I need. So I'm gonna add three sticky notes per person. So in this activity, people are going to add the tasks and the projects that they're currently working on onto sticky notes. So I'm gonna give each person a couple of sticky notes to start with. You can also assign different colors to different participants.

So, for this activity, for example, let's do that quickly for this activity, for example, it's good to think about how many sticky notes you think you're gonna add in the center here for each of the sections. They're gonna be different categories here too, but we probably want to be able to add at least three sticky notes in the middle of the radar. So I'm going to add three sticky notes here, and now we're going to increase the size of this framework. So that's what can make a little bit more space for our sticky notes and we can make it pretty large. 

As you can see when you resize the frameworks, the sticky notes on top of it will move with the framework. So frameworks are, we call them sticky. Anything you put on top of the frameworks will stick with them when you move them, this also means that that when you resize the frameworks, the sticky notes would be resized with them, too. So now just select the sticky notes and make sure that they're default size to see if they fit better. Now, this looks pretty good. Now we can fit about three different sticky notes in the middle of the radar. So I think we're good to continue now. For the Watson Erie directivity. 

You can also have different categories to this different pie slices. So I'm gonna go ahead and add a placeholder here. We're gonna add a title. We're gonna add a title to each of the sections. So we can just go ahead and add this order around the canvas. So before you invite your team to the session, or just before you do this activity together in the session, you can actually name these categories and assign different titles to them. It's now going to look at how we can fill some workspace for current state project Rose thorn bud. So Rose Thorn Bud is a really good activity that you can use for almost any type of check-in or to identify the status of a project.

So again, we're gonna use sticky notes. So we want to have one of the spaces for each of the participants. 

Since we have six people participating in the section, a session we're gonna need six different clusters so sticky notes, we can also assign, give a name tag to the sections, so that each person can claim the space and work there throughout the session. So now I'm going to select this one here. I'm going to duplicate it. I'm gonna move it a bit over to the side. I like to place this, individual brainstorming areas with a bit of distance between them, because that's where it's harder to look at what other people are typing, and you will ensure that you have a wider range of ideas. So now we have six different working areas where people can work within as well, so they can clean their space. Next we're going to do some affinity clusters and here, we could actually set up a little bit of space for people to create their clusters. 

In order to create clusters, the area tool is really useful. So we can have a couple of placeholder areas here and we can name them cluster one, we can create it's cluster two. We can have cluster three, et cetera. so when people are then sharing their observations at the same time, you can basically just drag the sticky notes in here and place similar sticky notes together. I'm going to add sticky notes into these areas. As you can see, the area will move with it together with the sticky notes. So this is a really good way to create clusters and groups, similar ideas. 

And then finally, we want to add some space here for next steps. so we could actually let's use the same color coding from the previous activity here. So I can just copy the sticky notes with different colors, and then we can go ahead and place them in the next steps here. That's also add, and then tagging here at the beginning. So we know who we're assigning to, and we're gonna add some arrows here as well. So if you hold down the city kid and drag, you can add connectors, separate easily. 

And if actually called the items in the menu that pops up here as well, you can automatically create the new line, put a new sticky note, at the same time.

Define outcomes for your template

Help others understand what goals can they achieve.

Define an approach for building a template with a clear flow
Order methods in a template to get a team to a desired result

Building templates with purpose

Teams use MURAL to work through challenges together. Your template could have exactly what a MURAL member needs to solve challenges and innovate. Before you begin to build your template, make sure you’ve defined why your template exists.

Ask these key questions to set up for success:

  • What challenge does the template help you and others overcome? 
  • What's the intent? 
  • Who's the typical user or audience for this process?

Describe your template

Once you identify the purpose, summarize it with a short description that introduces your template to that audience. In this summary, ask yourself: why should someone care to use this method? What’s the benefit this template provides to the audience?

This description will belong at the top left of your template to inform the audience when they preview your template in the library.

Need inspiration? 

Here are a few examples to spark your inspiration:

Work Life Impact Play Template by Atlassian

The Work Life Impact "Play" is a workshop created by Atlassian as a way to build empathy and identify the right support for your team through changing work experiences.

The Lean Procurement Canvas

Use the Lean Procurement Canvas to source a new partner/service/product, set up a new agile product development team, assess an existing partnership, and manage your partnership.

Rapid Mind Mapping

Rapidly map your ideas, observations or projects and uncover new perspectives and connections.

Was this lesson helpful? Let us know!

Thanks for the feedback! This will help us improve our content.
If you still need help or guidance please contact the support team
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

(upbeat music)

When designing a template, I usually start with a desired outcome and then work backwards to see what steps I need to take in order to achieve my desired outcome. For example, if I want to know what to do next in a project, I might start with identifying what are the challenges servants are facing right now? What is preventing us from moving forward? 

Then generates, a couple of ideas for solutions on how we might overcome those challenges. We can prioritize those ideas to define which one would have the biggest impact and with the least effort. And then we should end up with a list of action items that will help us achieve our goal. So, start thinking about what the desired outcome should be over your template. 

Think about what the goals you want to deliver but also think about the specific artifacts. What is the actual content you would like to have at the end of completing the activities? Each template is designed to help you achieve a different intention or different outcome. Let's look at a couple of them and discuss what those might be. 

The Get to the Bottom of the Stack Template is created to help you generate a large quantity of ideas in a short amount of time. And the outcome you would have after finishing this template would be the ideas that you came up with. The Blueprint Template is created to help you understand your customer's experience with your service or product and help you identify where the pinpoints are so that you can improve and come up with some ideas for actionable solutions. 

The outcome of the Project Planning Template is to help your team align on what the goal of your project is, how you would measure success, who will participate and what the costs are. The goal of the Product Planning Template is to help your team align on what the project goals should be, how you will measure success, who will participate, cost and other key items that you need to consider when planning for a project.

Add shapes to murals

Organize content and build flowcharts in your murals.

Locate the shapes feature in a mural
Edit and rotate shapes

Add shapes to the mural

Shapes are more customizable than sticky notes. They can even be used to create grids, flow charts, and more. 

Add a shape to the mural

  1. In the mural, click the second option on the toolbar on the left toolbar. The menu opens with different shape options.
  2. Click and drag the shape you need onto the mural.

Customize your shapes

You can customize your murals and use shapes to make them more engaging. When you click on any of the options at the top of the shape. Here are some properties you can change:

  • Background color
  • Border color
  • Text format, font, and color
  • Border line type and width

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Hey team, Agustin here, and I want to tell you a bit about our shapes, we have six different shapes that you can choose from in mural that you can simply drag out onto the canvas to customize your canvases a lot more. All that you need to do is simply click on the second option that you can see on the toolbar on the left side for shapes and connectors, and the bottom six options are all the shapes. So you can simply click and drag them out like this. And one thing that you may notice is that there are no text formatting options for these shapes. Well, the moment that you start typing in them, you actually get all of those options here. You can change the background color for them. You can change the border color, all the text format, the text font color, the line type that the border will have. So all of these things You can also increase the size. And when you increase the size, you can actually choose whether to make them either longer or wider. So it's a bit more customizable than, let's say a sticky note. And you can get very creative on what you can actually use the shapes for. So for example, I tend to use the square shape a lot for creating tables in MURAL, I tend to make them a bit of a rectangle, and then just simply duplicate them and align them to create maybe a grid, like I'm doing right here, since it's a lot easier than maybe drawing them out using the draw mode feature. So this is just one of the things that you can actually do with shapes. But then again, you with your own imagination can probably come up with many different ways to customize your murals and how to use the shapes to make everything is a bit more engaging.

Add images and GIFs

Insert images from your computer, the cloud, or the Web into a mural.

Three methods for adding images to murals
Insert GIFs into the mural

Tell visual stories with images.

Create murals and activities that tell a story with images and GIFs in murals. For example, images become powerful ways to convey stories in a storyboard. Plus, you can get your team laughing and connected with an energizer, like GIF tournament. You and your collaborators can add images in three ways: Drag and drop images, import files, or image search directly in the mural.

Drag and drop images into the mural

  1. Select an image from your internet search results, a folder, or your desktop
  2. Drag and drop the image directly into the mural.

Search and add images and GIFs from the Web

MURAL has an in-app image search to find and add files. Here’s how to add them from within the mural:

  1. On the left toolbar, select the image icon. This opens the image search.
  2. In the search bar, type in a keyword or phrase. To search for a GIF, type in the phrase “GIF” at the end of your search.
  3. Search through the results for an image you want. Hover over any image to see a larger preview. Click and drag the image onto the mural.

Import from your computer or cloud apps

  1. Right-click on a blank space in your mural to bring up the options menu.
  2. Select import files from the menu. This opens the options to import from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive.
  3. If you’re importing from a cloud-based service, you will need to sign in to access your images.
  4. Locate and select the image you want to import. The image will appear on the mural in the selected location.

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Hi, Gino with MURAL here ready to talk to you about how to add images and GIFs to power up your murals. First thing you're going to do is head to the left toolbar and click on the icon of a picture. What will happen is a toolbar will slide out with a search bar and all you have to do is search for the image you would like to add to your mural. You might be asking why we're adding images to our murals. And what I would say to that is because it's awesome how maybe you aren't somewhat of a static image person but really want to have a GIF playing on your reel because gifts are also awesome. All you have to do is simply add " G, I, F," to the end of your image search and I would love that as well. Now, that has been how you add GIFs to your murals. That’s all I will say to you. That's all for now.

Housekeeping for context

Create space for participants to get to know the agenda and purpose of the meeting.

Add key meeting or project details onto a template

Before beginning, set context

You have defined your outcomes and challenges and your participants are ready to jump in to start the activities. Before that, it would be a good idea to set the context and give participants a chance to warm up a bit. At MURAL, we call this the housekeeping section of a template.

This helps collaborators get to know one another and the digital space where they’ll be working. Plus, anyone who visits the mural following the meeting or workshop will know who attended and what happened. Your fellow MURAL member will appreciate the space to set up and set expectations.

What belongs in the housekeeping section?

Consider anything the participants for your meeting will need to know to successfully participate in the meeting or workshop. This might include:

  • The title and summary of your template
  • Information about the number of participants, difficulty level, and approximate time to complete the activity in the mural
  • Participants and any relevant information about them for the group
  • Agenda and purpose of the meeting or workshop
  • Helpful tips and tricks that the facilitators might find useful

See the Template Style Guide for an example on how to include these in your mural.

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(upbeat music)

I usually like to prepare some kind of, housekeeping content, as I call it, on the left side of the template. So, here together with the introduction, I usually like to have, maybe want a section with a purpose. So that we can introduce that to the participants. I'm actually going to add another title here. I'll call this purpose. I think we can remove that word from there. You can also create different, formatting for the headlines. You might want to add a little line here. And now that we have this section ready here. 

Now that we have this headline and the text ready here, I can instantly copy this and I can duplicate it by holding down the alt or the option key and clicking drag. And then I can instantly copy and move this section to add another one. 

So besides including the purpose of the session here, what the goal and the desired outcome is, I usually also like to include a section with the agenda. So here for example, I can add different times. I'm going to start at nine, going to have a check in, then at 9:15 for example, we're going to have a brainstorming session and so on. 

So this is definitely always a good section to include. Another thing I usually like to include in this section are the participants. I'm actually going to add that on the top, so I'm going to drag all this content down a little bit. So I'm going to select the content, and then I'm going to add, participants. So here I can add a couple of place holders as well. Work people can add their profile pictures. So in order to do this I'm going to open up the shapes and connectors section here, in the left toolbar. 

Then I can drag out one of these squares here. Increase it a little bit, so that it takes the form of a picture. The border color is a little bit hard so I'm going to soften it a little bit by making it gray. I'm also going to make the line dotted. We can also add a little name tag here, below. So people can add their names. Can drag this out, we can also center this, nice. And now we can basically, you can write profile picture. 

And now you can basically just, duplicate this and add as many as you need for your session. Think in this session we're going to be about six people. And so let's make it little bit more space for this. Cool. So this is basically what I want in my housekeeping section, to give a good overview when you start the session.

Share examples and resources

Introduce the methods and activities to the practitioners by adding helpful tips and instructions.

Help practitioners get familiarized with activities
Use instructions to make activities easier to complete

Supporting resources and guidance

Templates can also act as a way to introduce your process and methods to your team. You can add files and links to outside information to bridge the gap between the template and building the knowledge about the method itself.

Add tips and hints for facilitators

Save space for collaboration by adding tips and instructions for the facilitator to the mural in the outline. This helps the facilitators better understand the instructions and explain it to the team.

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(upbeat theme music)

Hi, Emilia here. In order to set your team members up for success we also want to add some more instructions and helpful hints. So let's look at what to add here. So in the housekeeping area here to the left I also wanted to set up an area where we can add some helpful links and resources. So I'm going to duplicate this element and then we can add 'Resources.' So here you can add links to for example, blog posts articles, videos, anything that would help your team use these templates on their own. So I'm going to start with this video tutorial which is a really good introduction video to MURAL that you can share with new team members. So in order to add links into the mural I can basically just paste them into the canvas and they will show up with a nice little thumbnail image. And I'm also going to add this blog post with some tips on how to facilitate meaningful online meetings. We'll also need to add some instructions here to make it possible for the participants to solve these activities. So I'm going to go ahead and select this section. And we're going to move it down a little bit to make some more space for the instructions. So for the instructions, I'm going to use the text boxes. And when I write the instructions try to be short and straight to the point. Try to focus on just what's important to know for this particular activity. A good example of instructions that are short and straight to the point are these instructions in the 'Human-Centered Design: Building Empathy' template which is basically in your own experience map. First, you should basically define situation: What experience are you trying to improve change? Example, going to the grocery. So as you can see the instructions here are very short and straight to the point and they were even providing an example of what this solution can look like. Another example which might have a little bit too many instructions: In this template for Rose, Thorn, Bud Affinity Clusters in the second activity here there is a little bit too much text. I don't know if all participants are going to read all of these instructions. Think about, that whatever you put in the canvas is going to be seen by the participants too. So you can only write the instructions in a way so that you're talking to them and not talking about them as in this example. One good way of thinking of this is to if you have a short version of instructions in the mural this could basically be your think about these short version of the instructions as the call to action.

What do you want the participants to do? If we think about the old times when we would use PowerPoint presentations or Keynote presentations in workshops to share the instructions this is basically what you would have put in the PowerPoint presentation. So instructions in the mural should be short and you can think about it as what you would have put in the slides in the PowerPoint. The outline that you can connect to different parts of the mural you can basically think about this as the speaker notes and tips for the facilitator. So in the outline, you can add a little bit more in depth instructions and tapes that can help the person facilitating the session understand how to better explain the activity to the team. So for example, I can basically right click on the radar here, and then I can add it to the outline. So if you click on this menu item let's think about what instructions would make sense to add here that would combine well with the instructions in the mural. So here you can now, say for example, 'Before you start' 'ask the participants' 'to pick a sticky note color.' Now we have some instructions in the outline that accompany the instructions in the mural and also give a couple of extra tips for the facilitators who are going to lead this activity.

Organize content into areas

Break your mural into sections that help collaborators navigate through content.

Identify areas and classify their type
Decide when to use an area
Add content to your area

What’s an area?

Areas are smart frames that allow you to keep all of the content together on a mural. There are two types of areas in a mural: freeform and grid.

  • Grid areas “snap”objects like sticky notes, shapes, and text into place and will automatically expand or contract when you add or delete content.
  • Freeform areas are more flexible. They keep content together, but won’t snap them into a grid.

Why use areas?

When you’re working in a mural, you might want to divide your work into different sections. This might happen for a presentation or when you have multiple methods in a mural. These areas give you the flexibility to move content on the mural together while still having flexibility to edit individual objects. 

Areas are also essential to building outlines in murals, which can be a great way to help collaborators navigate around these different sections of the mural. Now, get ready to add these areas to your mural.


Add content to an area

If you want to move multiple objects around without having to move them individually, you can add them into an area. A quick way to create areas is by using the “organize into area” function.

  1. Click and drag the content you want to group together on the mural.
  2. Click near your chosen content, then drag the blue highlight box over it to multiple-select. Once you release the highlight box, an outline will form around the selected elements.
  3. Right-click within the outline, then select organize into area from the dropdown menu. You will now have a permanent outline around your area.
  4. Once you’ve added content to your area, the content will stick and move with the area in the mural.
  5. Let’s say you don’t need an area anymore. Right-click the area and select delete from the menu. You will have two options: area only or area and content.

Formatting areas

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, what else can you do with areas? Once the objects are in the area, the title box will pop up. Write directly in the box to create the title for your area. The title will sit above the objects in the area. You can also hide the title.

From here, you can change the color of an area, change the size of an area by adding or removing content, edit the font and switch between freeform and grid areas.

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Hey, all you cool cats and kittens. Gino from MURAL here where I get to talk to you about areas. An area is a great way for you to organize the data you have on your mural by putting them into one section and being able to move them without having to move each of those individual elements. What you can do is let's say we've got our prompt here of what is your favorite movie. I'm going to start to organize these by type. Let's see, we've got Wreck-It Ralph and The Lion King. You're going to multiple select these two sticky notes, right click and organize them to the area.

Once I click that, I can edit the title. I can say that they are animated films. I'm going to make my area a little bit bigger. Now with my area, I can go ahead and drag and drop The Princess and The Frog, and you'll see, it will highlight. I can let go. Hercules as well. And now, because they're all part of my area, I can go ahead and click and drag around my area and all of those sticky notes will move along with it. That's how you generate an area, edit an area and add more elements to your areas. Have fun with your murals and wow all your friends with this knowledge.

Design for a visual flow

Draw attention to the key areas of your mural and keep them in place.

Create a clear hierarchy for your template
Keep content in place before you publish the template

Creating visual flow

Remember we mentioned that visual hierarchy in your template? Now, you can incorporate color, text, and numbers to highlight the key sections and make it easy for participants to follow.

Locking content

When MURAL members create a template, they can begin to edit the mural for their session. You can help your fellow facilitators by locking any content you do not believe needs to be moved and changed. This also notes to any MURAL member what parts of the mural are interactive and what is meant to be core to the template design.

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(upbeat music)

Okay, so now we have something that actually starts looking pretty much like a template. We're going to do a couple of final tricks just to clean this up a little bit. Let's make the titles a little bit larger. Let's also make sure that they're all aligned. Let's also add some numbers here so that it is easy to follow the activity. 

So in order to create the numbers I'm going to use the circle shapes here. So the reason why I like to use the shapes for the numbers is that with the shapes you can define both what the fill color should be but it can also decide what the color of the letters should be so I can make them look nice and transparent like this. 

Then we're going to duplicate the number. We're going to add a number here as well. Something else you can do as well is to give each of the sections a different color. When you're manipulating the session the colors can also help you. And the participants navigate easily between the different activities. So instead of just saying, "Okay, let's go to the roast thorn bud activity." You can also now say that let's go to the second activity, the green one and complete those steps together. 

I also want to add something behind the housekeeping section here to the left. A second visit to take one of these shapes again. I'm going to make the shape dark green. Let's remove the border as well. We might also want to add a logo. So here you have an image search where you can find almost any image on the web. So I can just go ahead and drop this into my templates so it's also branded as well. 

Before sharing your templates with anyone make sure that you go through and lock everything to the background. So, you probably want to lock all the elements that you don't want people to interact with but make sure to leave all the sticky notes unlocked. Second, just go ahead and select everything that I don't want to look at in the back of this mural. And then I can lock everything to the background. So this way people can go in and interact with your template but without moving anything by accident. This is super important to remember.

Build murals with frameworks

Add preformatted grids and diagrams to your mural to set up a collaborative space.

Locate frameworks in your mural
Define the value of frameworks

What are frameworks?

MURAL contains a collection of pre-formatted grids and diagrams. These are known as frameworks. Collaborators can add them anywhere in a mural. As soon as you add any object to a framework, the content in the framework will stick to the framework, similar to areas in a mural.

Find a framework for your method or process

To save time building murals, these pre-formatted frameworks host a variety of methods you can use with your collaborators. You can search and add these methods related to your team’s process or discipline.

Add frameworks to mural

To save you time building and designing collaborative spaces, the MURAL team has collected frameworks that contain methods like grids, calendars, methods for design and agile, and more. Frameworks are smart and will move the objects you add to the framework, treating them as a single unit.

  1. On the left toolbar, click the frameworks icon
  1. Browse through the menu to find icons related to different topics, like grids, design, agile and more
  2. To add the framework to the canvas, drag and drop the framework to the spot on the canvas where it belongs

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Hey, it's Daniela. Let's talk about frameworks. Frameworks are one of the many types of content that you can get onto your murals. And as such, you will find them on your dashboard here to your left, you will click on the menu and you will see that they are organized by category. 

To use them, simply drag and drop them on to your murals. You can also use the search bar here. And it will pull all the different frameworks that match your search criteria. frameworks are pre formatted areas that serve a specific purpose. In this case, we have an idea prioritization framework. 

And as I said, once you pull them in, everybody will be able to start collaborating very easily. And once they do that, you can move this and it will become one l element and move all together. In this way. frameworks will save you a lot of time when preparing for your meetings. So use your frameworks wisely, and use your meeting time to bring your best ideas forward.

Change the color of elements

Bring personality into your work or create branded layouts with the color pallette.

Change the color of objects in the mural
Recognize custom colors in your palette
Practice making objects translucent or transparent

Change the color of objects in the mural

The icons, sticky notes, text, and other objects you add to the canvas can transform your mural into a digital wonder. Create eye-catching work by changing the color of these objects with the color palette.

  1. Select the object you want to change. You will know it’s selected when it’s outlined in blue. A formatting menu appears for the object.
  2. Select the color box in the menu. The color palette dropdown menu provides a range of options.
  3. Select one of the color options in the palette.

Add custom colors to your palette

You don’t have to stick to colors you see as your initial option on your color palette. If you know the exact color you need, then add it to the palette.

  1. Select the object you want to change. You will know it’s selected when it’s outlined in blue. A formatting menu appears for the object.
  2. Select the color box in the menu. The color palette dropdown will provide pre-selected options.
  3. Under the custom colors section, select the plus (+) sign from the dropdown menu. MURAL will open the color options.
  4. Use the dial to adjust the color you want to use. Or, insert the hexadecimal or RGB color value for the color you’d like.
  5. When you’re ready, click add. The color will become part of your custom color palette.
  6. Select the color from the color palette to change the color of the object.
  7. To remove or edit a custom color, right-click the color in your palette and select edit or delete.

Make objects translucent or transparent

Create spaces with layers and effects on the canvas using the color palette. 

  1. Select the object you want to change. A formatting menu appears for the object.
  2. Select the color box in the formatting menu. The color palette dropdown will provide pre-selected options.
  3. Under the custom colors section, select the plus (+) to extend the color palette
  4. Slide the bar to adjust the transparency. You will see the A value change in the color palette.
  5. When you’re ready, click add. The color will become part of your custom color palette.
  6. Select the color from the color palette to change the color of the object.

To remove or edit a custom color, right-click the color in your palette and select edit or delete the color from your palette.

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Lindsey here, and I'm going to show you how to change the color and also customize it. Now you'll see here I have a sticky note and an icon. So, if I click on a sticky note, you'll notice that here in the toolbar, I have the option to change the color. Now I can change between any of the default colors that are loaded stock here in mural. But then you'll also notice that I can add custom colors and you'll see that I've added quite a few now toe. Add your own custom color. Just click on add color. At this point, you'll be able to search through the color wheel. Or, if you have the specific parameters for any of your colors, like the RGB code for it or hex code, you'll be able to edit them here. Now, say that I want to add this color. I'll click, add, and then you'll notice it's at the bottom of my list. If you ever want to remove any of the colors, you could do so by editing or deleting. Now I'm going to pick this one color for my sticky note, and you'll notice if I click on my icon. There's the little color change here is well, and I'm also able to see all of my custom colors, which I really, really like. Now. What's a reason why you might use custom colors? Because it's more than just the aesthetic for what our team does is we delineate the different people on our team with different colors, so I am actually always Navy blue. Jim is actually always the purple color, and Alicia is always the green color. So when we do activities as a team or we do an ideation or pretty much any activity that we do might do inside of a mural canvas, we'd use all of our different colors as a way to distinguish something different. Another item where you might use a different the different colors and use the customization is doing an activity like Rose, Thorn, Bud, where you have different color sticky notes that that mean different things based on the color so based on the color and then based on the content that is put into the sticky notes. All right now we've covered while how and why you might change and customize the color within MURAL. Whether it's the color for sticking out an icon or any of the other elements. Let me show you how to change the transparency of an element on the canvas or, to put it simply, make it see through. I love doing this to layer different parts on the mural, and it gives it a nice artistic Feel. I'll explain it in simple terms, and then I'll make it a little nerdy and explain the theory.

So let's say I wanted to make this rectangle see through so I can see the text behind it. I click on that element and I get a menu bar. So now I'll select the background color from that menu.

Mural gives me a rainbow of colors to choose from, but these are all solid colors. This last row here is actually different colors with different transparency, so from clear to a dark gray color.

So, if I select one of those now I can see through this rectangle. Let's say that you wanted to make it a specific color so purple, but also see through what I could do is at a custom color. So under this custom colors panel, I'll select add color, the plus sign right here and now I can use this dial to change the level of transparency from very, very see through to just a little bit.

I'll go somewhere in the middle for now, and it adds that color to my custom color palette here.

Now all I need to do is select that color, and it makes my element see through. You can tell any of these colors are see through by noting that there's a grid behind that color on the palate. So here's the nerdy park. This is actually called alpha in color theory, which is a channel that helps you determine the degree of transparency. So if I look at this color palette right here, if I change it to very transparent, it goes from one and it moves to zero and moving it back up from completely transparent as 0 to 1, I get different levels. So now you're learning a little bit about color theory along the way. That's how you change the transparency or alpha of your colors in MURAL. happy collaborating

Using examples for better understanding

Add examples where necessary to explain methods and activities.

Help your facilitators by clarifying activities and steps with examples
Explain the concepts in your template to the practitioners

Show example outputs

When leading participants through an activity, example outputs demonstrate what the successful output looks like for each method. Add examples throughout the template to guide the participants and facilitators so they know the potential outcomes for each activity and the entire process.

Being able to clearly communicate the instructions and steps for all the activities might not be enough. Showing relevant examples could set a good direction for practitioners and help them generate ideas. Use design elements such as different colors for sticky notes and text boxes to make your examples stand out and help the practitioners. 

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Hi, Emilia here. We looked at a couple of examples on how to include examples in your mural to provide the practitioner with examples of what good looks like, examples of how to complete the activities, in the lightning decision jam templates for example, we found examples of how to craft your "How might we?" statement and we also had a placeholder here where you can add your sticky note with your challenge that you chose to work with. We also looked at the blueprint template where we had very clear examples of how to use the different colors of sticky notes from the legend, to different aspects of the journey into the blueprint in here.

Just like in a cooking show, I went ahead and added a couple of examples to this template as well. Since you wanted to recommend the participants to claim a sticky-note color each, I went ahead and added a little name tag here, so the people can add their name to the first sticky note in order to assign different colored peach of the persons, in the session.

And then in the radar you would typically start the session, or, this is something you can prepare in advance as well, by assigning the different pie slices for different categories. So, in order to show what this can look like, I actually went ahead and assigned the first two pie slices here, with different categories and then I left the rest of the categories untouched here. I also started a couple of sticky notes in the radar sticky set an example of how it can be used, like for events, for example, we need to order t-shirts for the conference, so that they arrive in time and we will send it to practice presentations but at this point, I guess, ordering t-shirts is a little bit more important, so I'll add it, more closer to the middle here.

For the Rose thorn bud activity, In order to make it easier for the participants to understand how to use the color coding on this activity. I actually had an example here where for the rows, I clarify that these are things that are working well for Thorn these are things that need improvement and pod that will be opportunities. So hopefully this is going to be a little bit easier for people to understand and follow.

I also went, I had signed an example of the affinity cluster here. So, we have an example here of how we can combine different sticky notes from the different categories but as long as they have the same theme we can group them all together. So now our canvas is pretty much completed and ready to be published, in order to get to get started you already come pretty far. So, congratulations for that. And, I'm looking forward to seeing your templates. So feel free to share them with us.

Faster co-creation with shortcuts

Work with speed editing and moving around a mural.

Locate shortcuts in a mural
Modify content

Find shortcuts in the mural

Within a mural, find and learn the shortcuts from the help menu.

  1. Go to the question mark button at the top right corner
  2. Click shortcuts. This opens the mural shortcuts menu to reference. MURAL will show shortcuts specific to your device’s operating system.

What essential shortcuts do I need to know?

Leverage shortcuts to manage content and move around the mural. Know these five key shortcuts for your meeting or workshop.

Add a sticky note

  • Double-click on the canvas. Click the tab key to add multiple notes.

Pop-up an object on the mural

  • X + hover over the object

Select multiple objects

  • Shift +drag your cursor over the objects

Draw connectors

  • Hold the C key. Click and drag your cursor to create the arrow in the direction you want to go.

Undo

  • Control/Command Z

Duplicate content

  • Control/Command + D

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Hello there. I'm Hailey Temple. Shortcuts are an awesome way to quickly add or edit your work. I'll show you where to find shortcuts and a few of my favorites. I'm in a mural and to go to the shortcuts menu. I'll click this question mark button for help in this help menu that appears I'll click shortcuts and a toolbar will pop up on the right side. 

Mural has lots of shortcuts that you can explore, but let's just focus on the general shortcuts. It's important to note that since I am on, an apple device MURAL is showing me apple specific keyboard shortcuts. If you're on a different device, the mural will guide you so a few favorites to duplicate elements. I can select that element and then press command D to add lots of them at once. I can select Command Z to undo anything that I did not want there. If I want to select multiple elements on the mural, I'll hold shift and then click and drag to select everything I want. 

Then I can group everything together with command G. These elements are all moving together Command Z to undo now, one of my favorites is to select a locked element. So let's say that I lock these elements down. Now. If I want to select that locked element, I hold shift to command and click it, and now I can unlock it. You can also do this with multiple elements. So, if I shift and lock all of these down, what I can do is hold shift command and select all of these locked elements and unlock them all at once. 

These are just a few of my favorite commands that I used to work quickly in MURAL. Try some out yourself. Happy collaborating.

Group objects together

Move and manipulate objects as one object in the mural.

Differentiate between grouping and using areas
Group and ungroup objects in the mural

Why group objects?

When you add objects like icons, shapes, and text to a mural you can individually move and edit them. You can combine objects together to create unique designs and have the content act as one object. 

However, it’s important to note you won’t be able to edit the individual objects once you group them together. In these cases, you would want to use areas to keep objects together while still having the ability to individually edit objects.

Group objects in the mural

To group objects together:

  1. Select all the objects you want to group. We recommend the multi-select shortcuts, including:
  1. Hold SHIFT, click and drag your cursor over all the objects
  2. Hold Control or Command and click all of the objects
  1. A blue outline appears around the objects you select to group in the mural. Right-click to open the options menu. 
  2. In the menu select group. The blue outline will now appear around the entire group. You can also use the keyboard shortcut G to group objects.

To ungroup objects, right-click the group to option the options menu. Select ungroup from the menu.

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Hey there, I'm Hailey Temple. And I'm going to show you how to group and ungroup elements in a mural. This is really handy when you have lots of elements on a mural, and you want them to move around as a single unit, and you don't have to individually select them every time. So, here's what I'm going to do. First, I'm going to select all of the elements I want to group.

I do this by holding the Shift key on my keyboard, and then clicking and dragging my cursor to select all of these elements. I know I've selected all of them because they have this blue outline around them. And then there's this blue outline around everything. So, now I'm going to right click on the elements, and I get this pop up menu. I'm going to select group. What it's going to do is treat this now as one combined element, so all the sharks will move around together in the ocean. Now to ungroup these elements, I'm going to select the group, right click, and click ungroup. And, now they can swim independently again. So, one more time, multi select my sharks, right click, group and to ungroup simply right click again and click ungroup. That's it. Happy exploring in MURAL.

Build your content library

Save your favorite content from murals for convenient co-creation.

Save objects to the content library
Remove content from the content library
Re-use objects in the content library

What is the content library?

The Content Library is your personal centralized space to save charts, diagrams, exercises and other assets and re-use them in any mural in the future. Now, your most used assets live wherever you’re working in MURAL.

When you save objects to the content library, only you can access that content and re-use it in murals. However, other members can save whatever content they need if it’s on a mural.

Save to your content library

  1. Here’s how to save a group of elements to your content library:
  2. Select the group of elements you want to add to the content library using the SHIFT key and drag across it
  3. Right-click and choose Save to content library.
  4. Give your content a name for easy reference. This will allow you to search for it later by keyword when needed.
  5. To find your content, search by keyword or scroll through your content library.

Remove elements from your content library

Here’s how to remove a group of elements from your content library:

1. Click the bookshelf icon on the left toolbar. Locate the content you want to remove.

2. Select the three dots on the bottom right corner of the content. This will bring up a pop-up menu.

3. Select Remove from the library to remove the content.

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Duplicating and arranging objects in a mural

Save time building out your mural activities with these shortcuts

Duplicate objects
Duplicate groups of objects
Meaningfully arrange objects

Duplicate objects

Spend more time collaborating with others and less time building content. These shortcuts will help you take content you’ve already created and add it across the mural so you have your space ready to go for your meeting.

Select the desired item and press CTRL+D (CMD + D on Mac). You can also right-click and select 'Duplicate' from the right-click menu. If you’re more comfortable copying and pasting (CTRL + C, CTRL + V), you can do that as well.


Duplicate multiple objects

  1. Multiple select the group of items you want to duplicate
  2. Duplicate the whole batch as though it were a single item (CTRL or CMD + D)

You can also duplicate objects by dragging the objects

  1. Multiple select elements to be duplicated
  2. Hold ALT + drag elements to another part of the mural


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You made something awesome on a mural. And now you need to duplicate it a couple of times. Let me show you how, with a couple of speedy shortcuts. So I made this space right here for somebody to generate notes. 

And it's actually a couple of sticky notes, a textbox for someone to add their name, and this cloud icon. So what I'm going to do to duplicate it is first of all, hold down the shift key to select all of the items that I want to duplicate. Then when I right hand click, I get this menu and I can click that duplicate and it'll copy it right to the side, and then I can simply drag it to wherever I want it to go. 

Option one, option two, I select everything I want, simply Ctrl C to copy, or Command C and then Ctrl and Command V to paste. 

Same thing, it'll duplicate it and you can drag it to where you want to go. Next option you can Just simply press Command or Control D, and that will also duplicate it and then again, drag where you need it. Finally, if you want to use the Alt or Option key on your keyboard, you can hold that down and you get this double cursor right here. And you simply drag out those selected items where you want them to go. And that's it. Now I have duplicated these elements and saved a lot of time creating and building in a mural.

Embed murals and templates

Share a clickable thumbnail of your mural or template to web pages for easy reference.

Embed a mural

Sometimes, you need to take your murals outside of the app and make it easy for collaborators to view the work. Embedding murals makes this convenient and easy. To embed a mural,

  1. Click the share button at the top-right corner
  2. Switch the default share mode from edit to embed
  3. Copy and paste the embed code

Embed a template

You can share a clickable thumbnail of your mural using the HTML code we provide for each mural and template. At the top of your mural is the export drop-down menu, which you will need to embed any mural.

  1. Click the embed icon next to SHARE in the top toolbar .The drop-down menu opens. 
  2. Select Embed from the list. This opens pop-up with options to share your mural or template. 

In the window, you will see the HTML code to embed your mural or template. on the right, the content you need to embed a mural. You will also see a preview of the mural or template.

  1. Click into the box that contains the code-click to copy this information
  2. Paste the code into your website

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Hi there, Lindsay here and I'm going to show you how to embed a mural. Now to embed a mural, navigate up to the export drop down, click on that, and then click on embed. The share pop up box will come up and you'll see the content for that you need to embed the mural. If you click it will select it all. And then you can copy or right click and copy to then paste into either another document or a different site in which you want to embed the mural things and again, this is how to embed a mural.

Add data from spreadsheets to MURAL

Transfer important information from spreadsheets to your mural for quick collaboration and data analysis.

Copy information from your spreadsheet
Move work from a spreadsheet to murals
Download your data

Add data from a spreadsheet to a mural

  1. Open your spreadsheet
  2. Select all the information you would like to see on your mural. Copy that data.
  3. Go back to the mural and paste the information. Right-click and select paste from the menu, or use the shortcut CTRL + V. 

Now, you’ve added the data to the mural as sticky notes or text boxes.

Move data from MURAL to a spreadsheet

  1. Select the objects you want to add to your spreadsheet
  2. Right-click the objects. A menu opens. Select copy as text from the menu.
  3. Use CTRL+V (or command+V on a Mac) to paste them into your spreadsheet

Download objects as a CSV file

It can be useful to download important data after a collaboration session for further analysis. In MURAL, you can download your data to a CSV file and it includes: 

  • ID number
  • Text
  • Background color
  • Sticky type
  • Borderline
  • X,Y coordinates 
  • Area name 
  • Hyperlink

Here’s how:

  1. Select elements in a mural
  2. Right-click on the selection and click Download to CSV
  3. Find the CSV file in the Downloads folder on your computer

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Hello, Gino from MURAL here, and welcome to the most exciting minute and a half of your day today. That's right. Today we're talking spreadsheets. Now, while spreadsheets might not actually be the most exciting thing in the world, they can be extremely beneficial on a day to day basis.

What I'm here to talk about is a nice shortcut we have from getting your information from a spreadsheet to a mural. Now, I've got this nice blank mural here that I want to add cells from my spreadsheet to, I'm simply going to go to that spreadsheet. This is a Google Sheet, very important business spreadsheet with the foods I would eat foods I wouldn't eat, things that are green, and things that are clean. 

Now all I'm going to do is just grab all of that information and do a simple Command C or if you're on a Windows computer, Ctrl C, head back to my mural, Command V or Ctrl V, and you can see they all keep their same shape. So if I wanted to, I could simply bold all of these as well. So that way they could all show up just like the headers of my spreadsheet. Now, take this information do with it, what you will hopefully use it for good and not for evil. But that is how you get information from your spreadsheets to your mural.

Send data to Jira from MURAL

Plan projects together in MURAL, then move them to Jira to manage and plan your next project.

Perform the Jira integration
Demonstrate how to move from idea board to Jira project tracker
Outline how to set up links to Jira

Create Jira tasks and issues within a mural

  1. In the mural, select the sticky notes or text you want to send to Jira. To select multiple objects, hold SHIFT while clicking and dragging. You will know what you’ve selected when the object is outlined in blue.
  2. Right-click the objects and choose Send to Jira. If you don’t see the 'Send to JIRA' option in the right-click menu, you need to install the Jira integration.
  3. Use the drop-downs to choose the project, issue type and priority. You can always change these once the issues are in Jira.
  4. Click 'Send to Jira'.
  5. Click the link to see all of the issues you just created in Jira. You can also click the tag to go to that specific issue in Jira.
  6. All Jira issues have a link to the mural where they were created from.
  7. The object you’ve imported to Jira will now have a link to the task or issue so you can move between MURAL & Jira

Import issues from Jira to a mural

  1. Right-click the mural. A drop down menu appears. Select import Jira issues.
  2. Filter the issues to import based on Project, Issue Type, and Priority. Alternatively, you can use JQL to perform more detailed and complex queries.
  3. Select individual or multiple issues to import.

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Hello, Gino from MURAL here to remind you that only you can prevent yourself from moving from an idea board and MURAL to a project tracker. If you don't want to prevent yourself from moving from an idea board to a project tracker, it set up our handy JIRA integration to send any of your sticky notes to JIRA as an epic, a story, a bug or a test.

Now, what you can see here is I have my hills framework, and I've added a little bit of activity here of who's doing what and what that wow factor is going to be. And let's say we had to make some tests. I think making cookies is pretty important, at least personally to me. 

So I'm just going to right click on this sticky note, and then head to send to JIRA. A little pop ups going to happen so I can choose which project is going to be for what type of issue it is making cookies to me seems like a task project already, which is very high, almost a critical blocker. 

And that reporter is going to beat myself because I am actually putting it going to click Send to JIRA, you'll see that it was a successful and there's a little hyperlink here that you can actually click on this sticky note. So if I go ahead and click on this little link, it's going to open up in JIRA to say I need to make cookies. 

I'm the reporter put that priority is and then I can go back to the mural by opening it in the description. That was how you move from an idea board in MURAL. to a project tracker such as JIRA. I hope you learned a lot.

Edit published templates

Make changes to your published templates.

Edit published templates

Edit your template design

By design, templates are meant to be master copies of your mural. However, you—and only you—can edit your published template in your workspace if needed. If you published the template, you will see an option to edit your template when you preview it in MURAL. Here’s how:

  1. On the template preview, click Edit template button in the top right corner of the template
  2. Make changes to the mural
  3. When ready, click the save changes in the top right corner of the mural. This updates the template in your library

Changing templates submitted to the Global Library

When you submit a template to the MURAL global template library, our team can help you make updates and changes to your template. Request changes to your global template.

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(upbeat music)

Hello. This is Emilia here. So, do you remember the templates can't be edited? There are no elements in the menu here on the left, and if you try to click on the different elements. You can't. You can't move them. You can't do anything with them. So the reason why you can't edit template is basically to ensure that you have a master version of the template that the author and the person who published the template can control what's in it. You can, however, edit the template. If you create a mural from it, then you're basically editing the mural, and you can publish that as a template again. But if you want to keep the link to your template unchanged, you can add it the template itself by clicking on the template bottom here in the upper right. So, now I am in edit mode of the template. And as you can see, I have access again to the many here on the left side. So, maybe I want to add a little bit more music icons to make it a little bit more cheerful, so I'll copy one of this notes about it into the mural, make it white. It's good enough. So now that I'm done with my editing, I'm going to go ahead and save the changes. And now this change has been applied to the template itself. So that's how you can update your template without having to share a new link.

Capture meeting notes

Practice working visually with a MURAL at your next meeting.

Capture concepts and ideas with visuals
Add objects to a mural to connect concepts and ideas
Practice sharing your work with other collaborators

The power of visual notetaking

If you’re new to working visually in MURAL, then consider meeting notes a great entry point to build your confidence. If you’re sitting in lots of meetings but forgetting the key ideas and takeaways, let MURAL be your space to save and share what you’re hearing throughout your meetings. Plus, when you take notes in a mural, you can easily access and share your work across devices. 

You don’t need to be an artist to capture meeting notes in MURAL. 

Capture meetings with icons and sticky notes

Getting started with icons and sticky notes is easier than ever. Here is where you learn the process, tips, and tricks to doing this successfully.

  1. Before the meeting starts, create a new mural in the room related to your meeting.
  2. Fill your mural with details for your upcoming meeting, such as the meeting name. It’s always great to have a title, as it gives an instant idea of what the mural is all about. 
  3. Include date and time, the purpose of the mural, and then you’re ready to capture anything going on as the note taker. 
  4. You can also import other files as references throughout the session.
  5. Have the mural open while actively listening to conversations. Look for keywords and ideas that are important enough to capture on your sticky notes.

Add sticky notes with shortcuts

Sticky notes and icons are simple and effective visuals to capture your conversations. Practice listening and using these objects to capture key points in the conversation.

  1. Add sticky notes with shortcuts
  2. Double-click the canvas to add a note. Type in the key (and brief) concept you’ve captured.
  3. Quickly add multiple notes by selecting a sticky note, then pressing the TAB on your keyboard.

Add icons

Taking meeting notes in MURAL allows you to capture ideas using visuals and keep track of conversations long after they happen. 

  1. In the toolbar in the mural, select the star icon. The icon menu appears.
  2. In the search bar, type in a keyword that captures what you’ve heard. You’ll see search results for your keyword.
  3. Search and identify an icon that matches your note. Once you find it, click and drag that icon to the spot on the canvas where you want it to appear.

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Hello there, I'm Hailey Temple. Meetings are an awesome opportunity for you to practice visual thinking. That way, you are paying attention, capturing the meeting notes, and you have a record of the conversation that happened. So, let me show you my process and share some tips and tricks. First, before the meeting happens, start a new mural in a room related to that project. That way, it can be a space for you to capture all of the details of the meeting before it begins.

Now, it's time to capture those meeting details onto your mural. So for example, on the Mural, you might want to put the meeting name like Budget Planning Meeting. You'll want to add the date and time, and maybe you want to put the goal or purpose of that meeting. Whoever's running that meeting is going to appreciate that they have a note taker alongside them to capture anything going on. So, as you continue leading up to that meeting, you can also add more details. I love to add people's LinkedIn profiles so that I know who attended, and I could follow up with them later. Or I could import other important files or images to reference throughout the session.

Now, it's time for that meeting. What you're going to do is, have that mural open and you're actively listening to the conversation. What you're looking for are keywords and ideas that need to be captured that you think are important. You're going to capture those keywords and ideas on sticky notes. That's the easiest way to start. So if it's a budget planning meeting, I'll probably capture things like, budget for this year is, and then something like, the team needs to, or our goals are. So you're looking for these key pieces of information that will be helpful for you later on. A great tip in terms of capturing notes quickly in Mural is to use the tab key shortcut to quickly add notes. So if I double-click on a mural and I click my tab key here, I can add lots of notes at once and simply type in something. Yes, you can see, it makes adding notes a breeze.

Now, you've captured some keywords and concepts. Give yourself a moment to pause, listen again, and add some icons or images that bring those concepts to life. So, for example, I could use icons by looking up the term "budget" and I'll get some search results. Find when I like here. Let's strike this one on. And now I have an awesome visual representation of this keyword. Or I could search for an image and look for Team. Here we go. All right. This one looks pretty awesome. Let's do that.

So, you'll start building a visual vocabulary and a library that showcases what the meeting's all about. Keep listening and adding as you go. Once the meeting is over, it's time for you to share your work. You might feel like it's not quite ready for everyone to see, but trust me, people will think that you are a meeting magician, and they'll appreciate that you captured notes. Just use the Share button and invite people via email, or use the link.

Once you've done it for your first meeting, it's going to feel absolutely amazing. And what you need to do is, keep practicing. Whether you prepare for a meeting or not, just opening a mural and starting to capture those conversations is going to help you practice your visual thinking. It's going to help people keep a record of conversations happening. And since it's in mural, it's something that anybody can reference long after the meeting is over. So, use Mural to capture conversations when you're working anywhere. Happy collaborating.

Publish murals as templates

Scale your processes by adding a template to your organization’s library.

Determine two ways to publish your mural as a template
Manage templates in your workspace
Recall sharing murals with collaborators

Publish a mural as a template in your workspace from the drop-down menu

  1. Enter the mural you’d like to publish as a template
  2. Open the dropdown menu to the right of the mural name or next to the pink share button.
  3. Click the “Publish as template” option.

 Publish a mural as a template in your workspace from the export button

  • Enter the mural you’d like to publish as a template
  • Open the dropdown menu to the right of the mural name or next to the pink share button.
  • Click the “Publish as template” option.

Give your template a name

Add a name that describes the process or methodology for your template. MURAL will automatically add the term “template” to the name to differentiate it from a mural.

Then, add a description to the template with keywords that will help your workspace members find the template in the workspace.

When you’re ready to publish, select Publish Template. MURAL will automatically publish the template to your library and give you the option to go to the template so you can share it with others.

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Hi, I'm Stefan Viragh. I'm here to tell you how to polish a mural as a template. This mural here that we're looking at is a feedback mural that I've created. 

The purpose of this mural is to provide a space for one on one feedback between direct reports, your manager, other colleagues that you wish to get feedback from frequently. A couple of things to know before we go ahead and publish this mural as a template. Some of the questions that we want to ask ourselves are is the purpose of this mural and template clearly stated somewhere in the mural, and you can see here in the top left hand corner, I have an area for the purpose so it's clear to the to the user of this template, what the purpose of it is. 

Are there instructions? Is easy to follow. And here you have outlined instructions. And below that you can see a natural flow of how this template is supposed to be used. And it's clear now, especially with four different areas with four different months, when I'm going to be providing this feedback, or when I'm going to be using this template, and in the order that actually be populating this template, so I'm going to go ahead, now that I know that one, this mural looks well organized, it's easy to follow. 

It has a purpose, it has instructions, and it's an it's clean. I believe we believe by based on that criteria, that you can now publish this mural as a template. As a reminder, the intention of a template is for it to be very general that can be applicable to anyone who might use it and wish then they would make a copy of this test. 

Input and turn it into their own, putting their own branding on it and their own information into here to make it more relevant for them. So you as the user who wishes to publish this mural as a template, I'm going to go ahead and just edit the name of my mural that everyone knows that is not a work in progress anymore. And under the drop down menu, I'm now going to see an option to publish as neurons a template. 

I've given the green light all around but I'm now ready to publish this. From here. I'm gonna go ahead and provide an official name for this template, monthly feedback and a description. Use this when providing feedback and more specifically, one on one feedback. 

This is important so that as other users are exploiting the template library. It's easy to them for them to be able to see what the description of the template is. Often times template, creators copy and paste the purpose of their template they've left in the mural and put that in this space here that you see under the template description. 

Once you're happy with the name in the description, go ahead and publish this mural as a template. And you'll be given two options now. One, a confirmation message that you've published this mural successfully as a template. And now you have an option of going to view the template or choose nothing's going to the template itself will allow you to view what others see when they preview this template, and you as the template owner and the publisher can make any edits to the template that was just published. which you can see here momentarily. 

Here in the right-hand corner, edit template. So that was publish them URL as a template. And as a bonus, how to edit your recently published template.

Boost user experience in templates

Help participants navigate through sections and activities.

Optimize your template for improved user experience
Streamline the navigation for participants and facilitators

Why consider user experience?

Your template will be the home for a visually collaborative experience. Consider how you want participants to move through that digital space. Depending upon the activities in your template, you can incorporate simple design elements that make your template into a visual journey.

Readability from any level

When viewing your mural, participants will enter and scan the space to understand the activities and experience. You can arrange elements in the mural to show the order of importance while they review the content. This is a design principle called visual hierarchy, and you can use these key principles to make your activities easy to follow while completely zoomed out or focused on the details.

Create a legend

This Service Blueprint Template uses color coding to organize information. The MURAL creator included a key in this template for any participant to follow and use during a meeting. If you follow this practice, include a legend to demonstrate the meaning for each element.

Show a visual flow

We recommend ordering activities left to right as the group progresses through activities like we see in the Weekly Team Retrospective. However, we’ve seen incredible templates organized top to bottom, like this Design Sprint Room. You can even use a target approach like this Challenge Wheel template.

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(upbeat music)

- Hi, Emilia here. Let's look at some good and some bad examples of template design and get your creative juices flowing. This is an Ideation template that was probably designed about four or five years ago or something. So this template definitely has a couple of years on its neck already. And some things that we learned since designing these templates is that, it's usually good to make the numbers and the titles larger so that you're able to see them and navigate when you're fully zoomed out. 

Because when I look at this template now, when I'm zoomed out then I can see the whole template at the same time. It's very hard to see what the numbers are without zooming in. So it's really difficult for me from just looking at this template, understanding what order I should complete the activities. And also since the activities are placed kind of in the square with apparently, this is step one. And then here we have step two, then up here step three and step four, by moving in this kind of irregular way where we first go start up here and then we go down and then we go up and then we go down again, instead of doing this, it's usually better to move in one direction continuously. So rather moving from the left to the right or up or down or from the inside and out then changing direction too much. So an example of how this might be done in a better way. 

Another template that completes pretty much the same job as the Ideation template is the Lightning Decision Jam template. There are still some steps where we go, we start in the top and then go down and then we go up again but it's much easier to follow the order since we have these huge, clear, number of boxes before each of the activities, so this is to see in which order we should complete the steps. And they're even some arrows and things that kind of pointing us in different directions. 

So that really helps navigate around the canvas. So making the numbers and titles really large and easy to read really makes a big difference when it comes to navigating a template. So another example of a template that has done a better job is the Project Planning template. So here we have really large titles that are instituted when zoomed out. They're also making a great use of icons to illustrate the purpose of the different sections. 

There are also some sticky notes here in different colors which makes it look much more fun and engaging. And it really kind of gives you this urge of starting to add text into the sticky notes and complete the activity. And they're also nice frames around each of the sections, so that it's easy for people to understand where they're expected to have the right ideas and kind of gives you an idea of how much content you're expected to add here as well. So, this is a very nice template that I really recommend trying out. 

With good UX in a template, even the most complex methods can become easy to use. So in this example, we're looking at the Service Blueprint template. So this is the template that you can use to map your user's experience next to the customer's experience, to identify opportunities to improve the experience for both. So in this example, you can see how on the left side here we have a legend written, find out what each of the sticky note colors are for. And in the actual blueprint over here, you can actually find examples of what, complete examples of these different items look like. So for touchpoints here, for example we have the blue sticky note representing the touch points and then you can actually find here in the template a couple of examples of what this look template, what these touchpoints could be. We also said that we have things such as arrows. We have tips indicating how to use the different sections of the mural. We have different tips and hints sections that you can delete later. 

So, think through how to use these different elements to make it easier for the practitioners to use your template. Think about how to use the color to guide your participants. Think about how to include examples that show what good looks like, but the good example of an answer would be look for this activity. And also use arrows and lines that help guide your participants through the canvas.