I work in web development and over the past five years or so I’ve seen these “infinite canvas” or “whiteboard” applications proliferate over the years. A short concentrated list of these things would include miro, freeform, and obsidian. A longer list would include things like Confluence whiteboards and even things like Figma.
These applications always seem like they’re the preferred tool of people who love to navel gaze and go on long monologues about software development frameworks and “user experiences”.
I find navigating these tools to be frustrating and trying to “work collaboratively” in them to be even worse.
I understand some of them for some domains. (Figma I’ve grown to tolerate specifically because it seems to have a reasonable use case.)
But:
What is with these things, and why are there so many of them now?
Do they help anyone work better?
Do people actually like them, or are they just forced to use them?
I love them. I have some extremely hefty figma canvasses for software workflow mockups.
I also use them for reading documents. Not permanent storage, but when I need to reference 12 service manuals at the same time, I dump them into an infinite canvas so I can easily slide between them. Sure, I could open 12 PDFs, but I get confused navigating tabs by pdf names, especially when the filenames are incomprehensible document numbers.
Yeah, I’ve been noticing people are moving from a spreadsheet or word doc to a “board” of sorts. Microsoft has their own one that gets passed around at my org.
Seems to be a way to make the info more “top level” appropriate easily. Execs don’t want to be bothered with a spreadsheet anymore.
People who cannot create real things often relish in the ability to create a facsimile of something functional. The more complicated, the better such egotists feel.
You probably don’t like them because they aren’t meant for you and you aren’t used to them.
They should be used for brainstorming and maybe wire framing, or design in figma’s case. When designing or exploring the infinite space means you don’t have to stop mid session and move stuff around to fit pieces on a fixed canvas. It shouldn’t be used for anything final so the lack of constraints is good. They can also be good for interactive workshops.
If your team is using miro or the like for final work then they are using it wrong.
I hate these tools. They are all terrible and full of friction. So much pointing and clicking and zooming out and back in. They require so much effort for so little pay off. And they constantly nag you about features you dgaf about. I just wanna draw some boxes, put some text in them and connect them with lines, ffs.
I just wanna draw some boxes, put some text in them and connect them with lines, ffs.
If I want to do so textually — useful for very large, automatically-laid-out-diagrams, such as those generated automatically — I’ll use graphviz.
e.g.
foo.dot:
digraph { A->B B->C B->D C->A }And then:
$ sfdp -Tpng foo.dot >foo.pngproduces:
XACTLY. Unfortunately, my company won’t accept that as a valid diagramming tool. It must be in lucid’s shit. I’ve built some really cool exploratory tools using graphviz including a logical data dependency graph from database schema using a bit of (g)awk. Could navigate the graph in a browser because I had it spit out HTML.
This has been my experience as well. Designers love to slop it up in them because there’s no versioning or any way to tell what something looked like when it was actually developed. It’s seemingly impossible to set and maintain scope in them. Figma has some versioning support, but it’s probably the worst of all of them from a “which board are you even talking about?” perspective because they have 8000 C&P’d Figma boards all of which contain similar things and the links are 1500 character URLs with a bunch of UUIDs in them.
Our designers forced miro on us. It was so horrific I told them even Google docs is better for this. They laughed it off condescendingly.
Do you use these tools as a web developer, and if so, what for?
No, but I get them sent to me by others in my company. Usually someone puts a “board” together that is a bunch of screen captures into some huge, difficult to navigate thing with a bunch of “post it notes” and stuff.
What are you expected to do with these files? Are these what you’re given to build the design from?
Depends upon who put the board together. Sometimes, they want me to make them all into Jira issues because nobody can track them in the stupid board.
Your scrum master or project manager should be putting these stories into Jira. And infinite canvas boards can be great for a lot of UX work but you need to work together with UX and get them to give you better deliverables.
