Listen to this articleMural.ly is a tool for aggregating digital content, such as media and files, and organizing it into a form similar to physical bulletin board. Users can easily map that content, share their ideas and receive feedback for those ideas. Maybe the most accurate description of Mural.ly would be – it’s the GitHub of ideas. Megan Landes from Mural.ly team talks with us about this great startup:
Q: How would you describe Mural.ly?
A: Mural.ly is essentially a big online canvas that allows your to visually organize your ideas. You can dump your ideas to clear your head, supplement them by dragging in different kinds of multimedia, and use arrows and other tools to connect ideas and form insights.
The coolest and probably the most notable feature, of Mural.ly, though, is the ability to share this flexible canvas with your team and do all of that ideation together in real time, or asynchronously. One of the main benefits of Mural.ly is that it allows you to create a visual dialogue between users, their collaborators, and their ideas.
Murals can be populated by any combination of images, text, sticky notes, arrows, videos, etc. to convey the full expression of a team’s ideas. There’s also a big list of templates and sample murals users can look to for structure or inspiration.
Q: Who do you see as your primary target audience?
A: Mural.ly is a solution for the struggles of distributed creative teams, but its benefits are not lost on co-located teams and individuals. It was designed to enhance the collaboration experience of any and all professionals that use sticky notes on a daily basis and aim to generate and synthesize ideas.
We also designed Mural.ly with visual thinkers in mind, so if you don’t think in grids and bullet points, Mural.ly has a lot to offer you.
Q: What’s the coolest use of Mural.ly you’ve seen?
One of our most interesting clients is an agency in Los Angeles called McBeard. McBeard has grown to 70 people and managed to do it without an office. They rely on Mural.ly to have shared online design rooms they use as an arena for discussing concepts, collecting inspiration, planing out the design and delivery of social media content. They then use the same canvas to engage with their clients for quick iterations of the plan and production.
Up there with our favorite Mural.ly memories would have to be when we first tested our iPad app with 55 IDEO partners who got together for an all-digital session of note taking, brainstorming, synthesis and voting for a strategy they were working on.
Q: What can we expect from Mural.ly in the future?
In addition to our web client, we have developed an iPad app and experimented with exporting it to Windows. Now we are working on an iPhone app, that should be coming next.
We are also introducing some “smart” capabilities to make it easier to organize information based on meta information from the elements such as tags, keywords, color and who added the content.
We are also really excited about releasing a revolutionary “Mural Scanner” that scans a wall full of sticky notes and then creates a digitalized version in a Mural. The scanner maintains the original layout and content so you can scan your real-life stickies into your Mural.
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