Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$144
per year
Freehand by InVision
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Freehand, from InVision headquartered in New York, is an online whiteboard that enables teams to plan, brainstorm, and draw together. It aims to give everyone a simple way to visually represent ideas with charts, diagrams, and drawings. Whether for mind mapping, creating a customer journey map, or drafting up an org chart, Freehand can help teams make ideas and plans visual.
Figma is a solid design tool to craft the UX design concepts/solutions for digital products. For printed marketing materials such as brochures, marketing flyers, press releases, etc, other design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign might make more sense to use for those use case scenarios.
Freehand has been well suited for creating process maps and getting stakeholder feedback. It has also been good for brainstorming and "freehand" board creation. Some of the templates are hard to customize for specific needs so it's sometimes better to build your own from scratch. There are a lot of navigational issues with larger boards that require zooming in/out and navigating to different sections.
Tappable overlaid layers - bugs on fixed components, such as an app navigation footer in a prototype
Swapping a component but retaining inputted copy or imagery.
Performance on prototypes to work better in UserZoom - having to delete hidden layers manually, optimize images, and streamline the file, in general, is time-consuming
Folder structures - larger teams need multiple layers of folder structure to help find things.
Branch performance - we need better, more user-friendly solutions to get designs to merge better.
Branch performance - branching with the option to choose which pages you want in the branch without deleting each page you don't need.
Default sharing options need improvement.
Responsive ratios' in prototyping without having to recreate pages.
Better collaboration with Jira to bring in links in the design mode not just dev mode.
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
I am not in charge of the decision making on renewal or not, but my personal opinion would be to use FigJam instead as Figma is a software that we already have implemented and are familiar with. Invision would be my second choice on that topic
It's easy to use for designers who are familiar with design terms and functions from Photoshop and Illustrator. However, non-tech and non-designer collaborators have a hard time figuring out how to leave comments and apply changes, compared to other online design tools like Canva and Squarespace. Even simple drag-and-drops and rearrangement of certain blocks become too complicated due to uncommon functions like Hug and Lock.
Color Selection can be tricky when changing colors for shapes and text I've seen other users struggle with creating sticky notes and getting text to fit in the box properly and had to abandon the tool for a workshop for this reason After having a demo, I learned of new features I wasn't using. I don't know it would have been intuitive to find on my own.
I think it is pretty readily available. I had some sign-in issues recently (could not log in no matter what), and my IT department created a ticket with Invision to solve it. Other than that, I have never had any issues.
InVision Freehand gets such high marks because there is no page-load lag at all. We have other applications integrated with it and we see zero lag, or drag on it's operability. We work a lot of platforms that promise smooth integrations and they don't always work that way - with inVision Freehand we know it plays well with others
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
I haven't had to use the support team for anything, which is great news because that means the product usually works as expected! In terms of online support, I've been able to find videos that show how new features work. Also, many of the people I work with have experience with the tools so they are a great resource for me.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
The implementation is pretty much easy-peasy and plug-n-play. We simply download the applications and install, signed in and were good to go. I really cannot imagine that there would be anyone who would have any difficulty whatsoever in getting started in more than just a few minutes. It's really how implementing these officewide improvements should always go.
I learned UX Design using Sketch and my team was using Sketch when I joined. We no longer use Sketch, and therefore I cannot compare its current functionality to Figma, but at the time of our switch, Figma just had more advanced capabilities- better collaboration, auto-layout tools, prototyping, etc. From what I can tell, it remains best in class for UX Design tools.
InVision Freehand is closing the gap and adding all the functionalities that some of these tools provide separately. In the race towards a one-stop digital design ecosystem, InVision Freehand is well poised to deliver and connect where others can't. I hope that with the news of Adobe acquiring Figma, InVision Freehand can continue to be a leader and pioneer in this space.
Not everyone in the company has access to Invision, and they can't view the links I provide to them. I also wish everyone could view a file without logging in to the enterprise account. It comes in handy when I am doing focus-group studies or other studies with our customers that don't have Freehand. Unfortunately, if that is possible, I don't know how to do that.
Freehand has had a positive impact on WHO can collaborate on our designs. It's not just for designers. Anyone can pop in and contribute.
Freehand is a great value when included within everything else InVision has to offer. Really helps to bridge the gap between the "pretty picture" (prototypes) and the "deep thinking" behind why everything is how it is.
The only negative is that not everyone is on InVision. People use all sorts of collaboration platforms, and InVision is a bit of a barrier to entry when working with lots of people at lots of different organizations.
