Mural Retirement Study
UX Research
A qualitative user research study to help product owners understand user needs for whiteboarding tools and reduce friction during toolset migration.
Company: Blue Shield of California
Role: UX Researcher
Team: Project Manager, Digital Employee Experience team (Product Owners), LucidSuite team
Timeline: 3 months
Tools: Figma, Figjam
full case study
about
As part of the company's platform simplification efforts, the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) team made the decision to replace Mural with Lucid as its primary whiteboarding and collaboration tool. UX was asked to support the toolset transition by conducting user research.
the goal
To understand users' needs in regards to whiteboarding/collaboration tools and to uncover any questions and concerns in support of the DEX teams efforts in the upcoming transition to LucidSuite.
participant selection
The DEX team provided the UX team with raw data from Mural on each licensed user's activity and total number of boards. We chose to reach out and schedule interviews with users based on the following:
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Total number of boards (higher most likely meant more frequent usage)
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Business unit
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Suspected unique use case(s)
Mural user activity spreadsheet containing each user's total Mural board count. Users' names and email addresses were redacted for privacy.
research methodology
Figjam file containing notes from user interviews. User names were redacted for privacy.
user interviews
9 user interviews with BSC employees who were current Mural users and who were identified to have a large number of boards or suspected to have unique use cases.
Some unique Mural use cases uncovered during user interviews.
use case walkthroughs
Several users walked us through their Mural boards during their interviews and allowed us to take screenshots to be able to provide the DEX team with examples of more content and graphic-heavy boards. This raised the question of whether or not more complicated boards would be able to be transferred into Lucid while maintaining the same graphics and functionality of the Mural boards.
data analysis & key findings
7 unique use cases were identified
Through user interviews, we were able to distinguish the following unique use cases:
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Big Board Planning (BBP), which occurs on a quarterly basis
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Project planning (agile sprint planning, kanban boards)
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Deliverables (technical diagrams, workflows, value stream maps)
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Formal facilitation (workshops, trainings)
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Whiteboarding (idealization, problem gathering)
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Team building (1on1s, PDP tracking, all-hands meetings)
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One offs (agile ceremonies, retrospectives, scratch pads)
These use cases and their characteristics were made into a table for the DEX team to reference as they began hosting a series of training sessions alongside the team from Lucid.
other key findings:
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Manual user migration of Mural boards into Lucid (copy & paste) ranged from 20 min - 1 hr for typical boards/templates, depending on the number of graphics and visuals
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While the users interviewed loved Mural, the majority said that Lucidchart's ability to integrate with Jira was the selling point and made the toolset change something to look forward to
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Users' main concerns with the transition to Lucid included:
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Ability to transfer Mural boards into Lucid
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Lucid's external sharing capabilities
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How much support BSC was going to have from Lucid in regards to the transition
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user board migration
copy & paste
To answer the question of whether or not Mural boards were able to be fully migrated to Lucid without losing graphics for functionality, the UX team decided test it out ourselves. We obtained access to interviewed users' Mural boards as well as licenses for LucidChart. We manually copied and pasted each Mural board into LucidChart and documented our findings in the research deliverable, which was presented to the DEX team as well as the team from Lucid.
study outcomes
impacts
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Due to UX research findings, the DEX and Lucid teams were able to schedule and host training sessions for BSC employees based on their needs
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Users were able to voice that Jira integration is crucial for effective tool adoption, which became a priority for the DEX team to implement prior to launch.
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Manual migration of boards were not as time-consuming as originally thought and this finding helped the DEX team make the decision to not add migration assistance to the LucidSuite package, saving the BSC thousands of dollars.