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.
$0
per year per user
Piano Activation
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.
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.
Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
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.
