Our upgraded user interface puts the features you use most front and center, so you spend less time looking for stuff and more time doing what you need to do to be successful. Here’s a quick breakdown of some key changes you’ll notice when you’re in our new UI.

Once you’ve opted into the upgraded UI, the look and feel of the top bar, left visual thinking toolbar, navigation map, and collaborators bar are user-specific. This means that you can be working in the same mural with other people, and they may have the classic UI while you will have the upgraded one. You can switch between our classic and upgraded UI at any time using the Toggle theme button on the right side of the top bar.

Previously, you accessed both text and sticky notes by clicking the Text section in the left toolbar. Now, they each have their own dedicated spot for quick access, with sticky notes under the (you guessed it) sticky note icon and text under the T icon.

Click either of these to immediately access the type of content you want to add.

In our upgraded UI, not only do sticky notes have their own home—they also look a little different. You’ll notice sticky notes now have rounded edges and a drop shadow to help soften their appearance and create clearer layers between your overlapping sticky notes. And where text previously centered itself on a sticky note, now text alignment starts in the top left and works its way down as you type for clearer legibility while reading.

These subtle changes help create a more vibrant and engaging working area for you and your collaborators.

The left toolbar—where you find things like sticky notes, text, and icons—uses some updated iconography that’s high-contrast, bold and playful. For example, icons are now found by clicking the llama in the toolbar (previously found under the star icon). And your content library is now housed under the file box icon (previously found under the books icon). We also made the left toolbar black; when paired with the high-contrast white icons, it helps create a more accessible experience for a wider audience.

If you’re facilitating in a mural, we want your Facilitation Superpowers to be front and center. Previously, things like the laser pointer and private mode were found embedded in the top toolbar. Now, they’re all intuitively grouped together towards the top right of your canvas. This lets you easily find them while seamlessly leading a session.

Your member avatar is how you access things like your profile settings, your workspaces, and the company dashboard (on Enterprise plans). Before, your avatar lived in the bottom left corner of Mural. Now, it lives in the top right. This offers you an unobstructed view of the canvas by grouping your avatar with the other items in your toolbar.

We’ve made navigating in a mural easier by streamlining navigation controls. The toggles for move mode and trackpad/mouse mode now live beside each other, and you have the option of turning the map on or off right from the canvas so it doesn’t obstruct your working space. To make things even better, the map is now larger, which helps you more easily identify where you are in a mural and to find what you’re looking for.

Once you’ve opted into the new UI, new murals will have the upgraded content style (rounded corners, drop shadows and left text alignment) by default. To upgrade the content style of existing murals to the new look, you need to manually update each individual mural. The content style is a property of a mural, meaning everyone who sees the mural will see the same content style. It works similarly to an infinite canvas, for example: once you select an infinite canvas for your mural, every collaborator in that mural will see the infinite canvas.

To update the content style for an existing mural:

Now, everyone who accesses this mural will see the updated content style.

The updated dashboard shares some of the elements covered above (like your member avatar relocating to the top right of the screen) but there are a few other changes you’ll notice. First, the search bar is now located in the center of the top bar. And as you type, your dashboard narrows to show the results rather than showing up in a separate modal on the screen. These search results are now also cross-workspace, which means you don’t have to worry about searching for a mural or template in each individual workspace you’re a part of—you can search them all at once!

Similarly, the sidebar navigation of your dashboard is also now cross-workspace. When you select Home, Recents, or Starred, the content you’ll see is drawn from across all the workspaces you belong to. If you want to see a specific workspace, of course you can still do that! You’ll find a new workspace selector near the middle of the sidebar.

Lastly, we’ve given rooms their own dedicated landing page. Click on Rooms in the left sidebar and view your starred rooms, private rooms, and open rooms in the selected workspace. To browse a grid view of all rooms by type, click on the row title or the View more option to the right of the title.

To provide feedback on the new Mural experience:

We genuinely appreciate your input and thank you for taking the time to share it with us.