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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
UX Designer / Researcher in Product Management at Extron (501-1000 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I collaborate with team members by creating and sharing product wireframes, research boards, educational material, product and component research findings and recommendations, flow maps, journey maps, etc. InVision Freehand addresses my ability to share my work online collaboratively with team members and receive comments and approvals since I work remotely. I have also been able to share boards for user research studies and focus group studies.
Pros
Bring in and embed external files and view them on the board without having to move out of freehand. eg. pdf's, power point, youtube etc.
Creating wireframes, flow maps, all and any kinds of created art boards to share with team members.
Ability to create text and link to external sites
Can format and create pages with text and bullet points right in freehand, rather than having to go to another software to do the same.
Collaborate with Team members all on the same board and project at the same time and get feedback live in a meeting and/or even later.
Love the different templates that have been provided for me to use as a starting point.
Cons
Would like for Freehand to bring in Sketch files without having to use Craft as a plug-in. eg. like it does for Figma and XD files.
Most Important Features
Collaboration
Sharing
Creation
Commenting
Polling
Return on Investment
Time saver for remote users
Work at own pace with ability to collaborate
Share ideas and concepts with team mates and get fast feedback
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
User Experience Designer - I in Information Technology at United Wholesale Mortgage (5001-10,000 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use InVison Freehand for different exercises with our team and also other teams within our IT teams. Since this is freestyle we can use it to show how we envision the application or the website is going to look. We use it for brainstorming, Whiteboarding sessions, low-fi prototyping, and wireframing.
Pros
I personally enjoy the ready to use templates for different UX processes.
The new wireframing tool is soo awesome.
I enjoy collaboration feature of InVision.
Cons
May be having a rotation feature for elements would be nice.
May be having a user testing feature.
Improvements to the code inspector for dev. handoff.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Creative Director at nimbl digital (11-50 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Freehand for the beginning of our design process. It may be a quick mapping of a process or screen sequence that begins to illustrate the UX based on requirements. It's a very fast and iterative method that we can also socialize with our client to get buy-in before elevating the fidelity of the concepts.
Pros
Decision trees and conditional logic mapping.
User Experience and sequence of screens.
Wireframe and other templates that are quick to drag and drop in.
Sharing freehand with client as a link.
Easy to draw layouts and connect the interactions as an experience map.
Easily create notes and document interactions, rules, and requirements that are being met.
Cons
A method for stamping or assigning statues and approvals.
Adding a way to have a bit more than a comment so that a client or PM could drop in a detailed product requirement to keep in mind while drawing.
Being able to quickly build out tables for a design.
and interactive click through a concept like the UX plugin Overflow (overflow.io).
Use the same sharing functionality as the rest of Invision. Freehand doesn't have the same sharing method, and that's really annoying.
Most Important Features
Fast and easy to use.
more like drawing and less like a design or software app or tool.
templates that are ready to use.
collaborative design process, allowing multiple designers at once.
follow a designer - and then use a simple phone call or teams meeting for audio.
Return on Investment
The client has become reliant on having a freehand to help visualize ideas.
I use the term with the design team. "No picture, No concept. Draw the picture."
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Sr/Lead Product Designer at DoubleVerify (501-1000 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Share the working design development in progress with stakeholders for discussion. Have an easy-to-use, cloud-based, real-time brainstorming and collaboration platform. Have a centralized place for collecting and archiving a variety of documents and assets. Collect product requirements and specs before starting a project Deliver annotated design specs and interactions to the engineers Have a regularly updated live document and a retro board
Pros
Realtime collaboration and brainstorming
Bringing in external resources like a Figma or Sketch, and keeping them in sync
Collecting comments/feedback in a thread directly and visually in context
Cons
Integration with Figma is rather minimal. Key features like inspecting design specs and embedding prototypes are completely missing.
Browsing between spaces and viewing files across them can be done differently. In the absence of proper breadcrumb and/or global navigation, it takes work to navigate and is often disorienting.
I'd like to see the "Space Overview" editing mode evolving a bit. Perhaps along the line of other tools like Notion or Coda. I understand it's not a core feature of InVision Freehand, but would be a nice bonus.
Figma is the internal design tool of choice, and the limited integration with Figma makes it rather difficult to justify the usage of InVision. Many of the design process features—e.g. prototyping, comment threading, freehand whiteboarding, etc—are already baked in in Figma, while certain InVision-specific features can also be accessed via another tooling (e.g Google Drive, Google Doc, etc).
Alternatives Considered
MURAL (formerly Mural.ly), Notion, Coda, Miro, Zeplin, Google Drive, Figma, Lucidchart and Balsamiq
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Adjunct Professor - Digital Media & Advertising in Marketing at Temple University (11-50 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Using InVision Freehand helps us plan brainstorming sessions or ideation workshops. What we love is the flexibility and ease of use. There are a lot of whiteboarding tools out there that are either working to improve a faulty product or they're just getting in late in the game to catch up with the remote/hybrid workforce needs. InVision Freehand bests all of them through a reliable platform we've trusted for years. Having worked with multiple clients and agency partners over the years, what I love when using inVision Freehand is that they are clearly watching the competitiveness of online whiteboarding solutions and staying ahead of the pack. There's just a better, more intuitive feeling when working with Freehand. Working with inVision Freehand is just a complete no-brainer recommendation. It's fast, nimble and continuously refined to make an excellent working environment and platform even better.
Pros
We use InVision Freehand for brainstorming new marketing campaign ideas.
We create a lot of Customer Journey mapping ideas and the InVision Freehand environment provides us with exactly what we need to be successful in creating a collaborative workspace to do so.
For some of our clients and concept campaigns, we work out website wireframes. InVision Freehand proves us with a great blank slate - and provides the intuitive tools to go from an empty page to a completely blocked-out website structure - seemingly in no time.
For working with clients all across the country, InVision Freehand provides us with an awesome shared board to present and propose new business opportunities for them - and for us!
The continued improvements and nuances make using Freehand a "Go-To" solution for me and my team every day. There are platform updates made pretty much every month. It shows that the dev team is always looking out and listening for ways that they can improve the user experience and usability.
More templates being added all the time have been a great way for us to kick off conversations and workshopping with internal and external teams.
Cons
While we love using InVision Freehand, it's not always as intuitive for the non-agency folks we sometimes work with. It's not impossible or hard. Just could be easier to onboard them.
There are so many great tools that are built into InVision and Freehand takes it to the next level. That said, there are other platforms in this space that are advancing in integrations with many of the other live meetings and sharing tools that agencies, clients, and the general public have become so accustomed to over the last couple of years.
We would love to be able to use InVision Freehand as integrated or embedded in our sites or gated parts of live sites we work on.
There aren't too many things that I could point to that would be considered problematic - I might like to see some new movable menus.
Some additional sharing options might be nice to have. Right now there a lot of integrations with platforms and being able to work/share in those spaces would be interesting. An example might be sharing in Slack and being able to work right within a working team channel.
Most Important Features
The flexibility of all of the tools that InVision Freehand has for us to select from.
We love having the pre-built templates as options for us when we are setting up a working session that may be covering the subject matter of topics that we have not previously worked on.
The variety of meeting structures and live interactive tools really help us to present engaging content for our meetings. Things like live sharing and polling etc, are a huge plus as well.
What we really like is that InVision Freehand, just like the InVision we've used for years, is constantly improving its user engagement and integrated options for us. Not all of the platforms out there do this - which you'd think they would just as a matter of common sense.
The ability to include things like a live Polling feature is an awesome addition and serves great purpose when we work on a wide variety of ideas and need to identify which are standing out from the rest.
One thing that has been a great built-in tool for us in inVision Freehand is the ability to work on wireframing exercises with our design, UX and UI teams to come together and reach consensus in a more timey and efficient way.
Return on Investment
Using InVision Freehand has enabled us to promote our ability for workshopping client meetings and even use it for new business opportunities.
By using InVision Freehand we can quickly and easily create wireframes and project workflows.
We couldn't really be working as quickly these days without being able to use InVision Freehand every day in one way or another.
The positive impact we've felt across agency disciplines has been just what we'd hoped it would be. Everyone is easily able to join in a working session and participate freely and easily.
Adding Freehand has been one of those head shaking moments where we thought "why haven't we done this sooner!" and happy that now we have it.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Figma, Miro, MURAL, Zoom Webinars and Webex Meetings
