There has been a drastic shift in the working environment and collaboration for most when the pandemic started. This pushed online collaboration platforms to perform better and think of ways to improve for users. One such collaboration platform that has paved the way for collaboration is Miro, now with over 15 Million users, they have clearly shown better ways of collaboration during these times.
When the first lockdown happened there have been worries about working off-site to brainstorm, collaborate, visualize maps, and also get feedback. We used to believe especially when it comes to creativity in work happens when people meet, this has smoothly transitioned now to an online basis thanks to Miro.
As a design management student, we use mapping and visualizing during classes and projects quite often, which meant during lockdown we were desperately trying to find ways to keep the same working style online and researching tools to help. This was also the case for any designers, teams, etc. This is when the social design comes to play, realizing there is a social need and finding ways to the working ways easier for the people. Designing tools to collaborate, providing a template for easy layouts, post-it notes concept, multiple users on a page are some of the applications Miro provides.
Having Miro as a big part of our work now, we got the opportunity to participate in an online talk with Andrej Balaz, a designer at Miro, to understand the social design aspect in a collaboration platform and how they always strive to change and adapt according to their user’s needs. They want to make themselves so useful, their users will find it hard to collaborate without Miro. This shows how implanting social design helps a software company to strive, this will not end when the pandemic does. Post pandemic working environment would more or the less have the same working style, we have adapted and evolved new ways and this time is the use of more online tools. The reason is the feasibility of such a platform, the ability to check the works and brainstorm anywhere, on the go or at home than being just restricted to the classroom or workplace.
By Ann Maria Mathew