Miro / FigJam
Digital whiteboards built for remote teams to run design sprints, user journey mapping, affinity diagramming, and real-time collaborative workshops.
What it is
About Miro / FigJam
Miro and FigJam are collaborative infinite canvases built for team workshops, design thinking sessions, and visual problem-solving across distributed teams. Both tools allow multiple participants to work simultaneously on the same board — adding sticky notes, drawing connections, voting with dot-stickers, and moving content — making them the remote-working replacement for a physical whiteboard covered in Post-its. Miro is the broader platform: it has a richer template library (user journey maps, affinity diagrams, empathy maps, Kano models, retrospective frameworks, service blueprints, SWOT analyses, Wardley Maps), a presentation mode for sharing boards live, and deep integrations with Jira, Confluence, Asana, and Slack. FigJam is Figma's whiteboarding companion: it has a simpler interface optimised for quick sessions, integrates natively with Figma design files, and allows teams to jump directly from a FigJam mapping exercise into a Figma prototype without switching platforms. For a UX Designer, these tools are where early-stage design thinking happens before any wireframes are drawn. A two-hour design sprint facilitated in Miro — starting with an empathy map, moving through a user journey, and ending with a prioritisation matrix — aligns the whole team on the problem definition before any Figma work begins, preventing the common failure mode of iterating on wireframes of the wrong solution. For a Social Worker or multi-agency team, FigJam or a simple Miro board provides a shared visual workspace for remote case conferences where participants cannot be in the same room.
What you can do with it
Capabilities
Facilitate a remote affinity diagramming session in Miro — sharing the board link with six team members, having each person add observations from user research as individual sticky notes, then clustering them together in real time into themes, naming each cluster, and voting with the dot-sticker tool to prioritise which themes to address first
Run a user journey mapping workshop in Miro using the built-in template — populating stages (awareness, consideration, onboarding, retention), adding the user's actions, thoughts, and emotions at each stage, and marking the moments of highest frustration with red flags to identify where the design team should focus first
Build a service blueprint in Miro that maps user-facing touchpoints above the line and back-office processes below it — linking each user action to the underlying system event, staff task, and policy document, to identify where manual handoffs create delays that the user experiences as friction
Use FigJam's timer and voting features to run a design critique — presenting three design options, giving participants three minutes to add reaction stamps and sticky-note feedback to each, then running a dot-vote to surface which direction the team should prototype next
Connect a Miro board to Jira so that sticky notes from a sprint planning session can be converted directly into Jira tickets — dragging and dropping them into the sprint backlog without retyping the content
How to learn it
Learning Resources
Miro Academy (miro.com/blog/miro-academy) — free; short courses on facilitation techniques, template customisation, and running specific workshop types; the "Introduction to Design Thinking with Miro" course is a strong starting point for UX practitioners
FigJam's built-in template library — free; FigJam ships with templates for retrospectives, brainstorming, and journey mapping that are immediately usable; starting with a template and running a mock session with a colleague is the fastest way to learn the tool's facilitation features
IDEO's Design Thinking Field Guide (designthinking.ideo.com) — free; while not Miro-specific, this resource explains the workshop methodologies (empathy mapping, journey mapping, prototyping) that Miro's templates are built around — understanding the method makes the tool far more effective
Voltage Control (voltagecontrol.com/resources) — free articles on workshop facilitation, including how to structure a 90-minute remote session in Miro for a team that has never used digital whiteboards before
Pro Tip
The most common reason a Miro or FigJam workshop produces nothing actionable is that it ends without a clear output artefact. Before you start the session, name what you will have at the end: "a prioritised list of five user pain points" or "a agreed user journey with three key moments identified". Then design the workshop backwards from that output. A board covered in colourful sticky notes that closes without a decision or a next step is a good experience but a wasted hour.
Skills that use this tool
Roles that use this tool
Alternatives