Bluescape is a cloud-based, software as a service company based in Silicon Valley, CA, that provides a digital whiteboard of the same name.
$10
per user, per month (10-50 licenses)
InVision
Score 5.8 out of 10
N/A
InVision is a collaborative design and prototyping platform with features such as freehand drafting mode and interactive mockups, collaboration, idea management, user testing, and integration with Slack and other collaboration tools. According to the vendor, 1 million designers are using the free version.
This digital version of a pin-up space is absolutely an improvement to my workflow. The input is so robust. What you do with it is where the magic happens. This program is best suited for team collaboration. It helps to discuss how/where the team will contribute information to it--whether that is discussing the templates or a plan of action. Otherwise, the workspace can tend to get messy. I like the idea of having a presentation mode, where some of the markups could be hidden. The idea of a working session with consultants or clients sounds appealing, but at the same time, there is a desire for a cleaned up, clear shareout.
InVision is well suited for design reviews and immersing yourself in the experience of an app-to-be. As a Product Manager, it's difficult to take abstract concepts, user pain points, and business needs, and produce a vision for an app without a visual aid to communicate a vision. InVIsion offers PMs, designers, and developers the opportunity to sketch a vision, communicate about it with inline commenting, and shareable with other stakeholders.
We have uploaded Ceros, PowerPoint, renderings and website links to our wall for new client presentations and they are always impressed with the technology.
Ceros is a pretty robust program that has links and different touch points and customers love clicking and scrolling through information posted.
We use one wall to post all of our customer boards so we can quickly jump into a different board and show new ideas or companies that we have done business with with a few quick swipes.
Chat function is less than ideal. It is easy to lose track of a conversation or a comment. We find making comments on the workspace turns out to be more effective.
Mentions--it would be nice to be able to assign groups within the people added to the workspace. Sometimes it'd be nice to do a quick mention with out having to do @everyone or type several names in (@person1, @person 2, etc.)
Designs can be very slow to load on mobile devices, particularly when they include many screens.
There isn’t an offline version of the full app, which feels less-than-ideal for many of our teammates who live in areas with more spotty internet.
There are limited functionalities to portray animations and transitions. This hasn’t been a huge issue, but it makes the app feel a little out of date, considering the range of such functionalities in other apps.
I didn't need to contact InVision support, as I've never needed it. They have an intuitive UI, and most of the questions are answered in their help portal or in tutorials online. Since many people use it, there a great resources available on for example YouTube. No problems so far with InVision.
I've only used the Google one and the Microsoft one, and those have pretty limited features in comparison. The canvas size being huge is a great asset to me because nothing sucks more than when you literally can't fit your ideas on the canvas. Also the speed it updates and how easy it is to share around with people seems to be easier.
[InVision] provides the ability to iterate really quickly, in fact, it is so intuitive that can be applied on live wireframe designing, while the ideas are being scratched and stormed from the team in a single discovery session, as well as allowing and giving access to the whole organization to the final outcome
