FigJam is an online interactive whiteboard from Figma headquartered in San Francisco, presently in beta (2021) but available to the public in a free trial. The vendor states that in 2022, FigJam will have plans for $0, $8, and $15 per editor, per month.
$5
per month per editor
InVision
Score 7.0 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.
I feel like Figjam is great at at what it does. It provides a great overall place to be able to use a virtual whiteboard and help teams collaborate. Especially remote teams. It actually does it better than others. There are some tools such as InVision Freehand that at the …
It is well suited when people use it to sketch the first wireframes of the UX, like the Breadboarding technique from Basecamp. I used to work like that when modifying some UX. Our designers used to sketch over our current experience wireframe, and then we could discuss it by using the comments in Figjam or the Call feature at FigJam. That made it easy to discuss it. When building up group boards to discuss ideas, I use Miro, once it has more native pre-sets that help conducts the discussion.
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.
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.
Positive: FigJam is cheaper than Miro and allows connecting with FigJam, where we design our user interfaces. FigJam is more complete and visually appealing than draw.io, although draw.io is free. FigJam allows calls, which both competitors do not. Negative: Miro has more pre-set diagrams than FigJam and they are native and easy to use FigJam is paid, while draw.io is not.
We only tested out using Adobe XD for similar uses and found it to be more challenging to fit within our processes. It didn't have as robust a set of capabilities as InVision and wasn't as easy to use enterprise wide. I recall also having issues with working with Sketch.
InVision helps our team better and more professionally portray the value and the work we do as designers, leading to more company buy-in in supporting and funding our work. In the past, we would create PowerPoints with screenshots to portray a user workflow that we would share out to stakeholders. Once we began to use this app, where stakeholders could click through and comment as though they were “real” users, stakeholders began to better understand our work, designs, and workflows. This has led to more productive conversations that, in turn, lead to more effective end products that have more consistently served our business goals in tangible ways.
InVision helps us save production time, effort, and cost, as we are able to solve design issues early in the process by having clickable prototypes to show to internal stakeholders and external users. It’s, understandably, difficult for people to provide effective feedback on screenshots. Using the clickable prototypes we created in InVision, we are able to get more effective feedback to solve user workflow issues before we spend time and money developing problematic designs (and later having to redesign them).
It’s easier to market designs to potential buyers with clickable prototypes than with screenshots. With these prototypes, we’ve been able to sell more digital products before product release dates, which has helped to secure many contracts and new business relationships that continue to this day.
