Welcome to the collaboration party!
October 27, 2022
Welcome to the collaboration party!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Freehand Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with InVision Freehand
The way we use Freehand is constantly evolving as we find more ways for everyone at our company to use it. It started first as a way to make lightning-fast mood boards with a handful of designers. Then we realized that we could open it up to all of our non-designers, too, since there's no need to install anything or learn how to use special design software. So now we have people from all across the agency working in there, too now, filling in technical or strategic insights. And at the end of the day, what we're left with is a big document that completely captures all of our thoughts — not just pictures — and we can then share it as needed.
- Infinite Canvas: we're never limited to dragging n dropping, and pasting more and more stuff into it.
- Live collaboration: It's the closest thing we've had to a full team working on a whiteboard since covid.
- Sketch Integration: It makes updating designs/mockups a lot easier when I can push a button in Craft and not have to manually replace an image in my browser.
- The resolution: Our webpage designs always pass the resolution threshold to where freehand starts to work its compression. During presentations, it can be a little embarrassing when we can't read the copy because it looks like potatoes.
- Embedding videos: GIFs are only good to a certain point, and creating Vimeo embeds is tedious. I wish I could embed MP4s or web assets a lot quicker.
- Touchpad panning: I can't tell you how many times I've "gone back" in my browser when I'm just trying to pan across the freehand. Has honestly made me wanna force quit on many occasions.
- Sticky notes and text in shapes: Overall, it's really hard to use the sticky notes and text inside rectangles without the text just getting all over the place. It's different sizes, it gets too tiny, it gets way too big, and overall, it just doesn't look professional, even with a lot of fussing.
- No ability to crop/mask an image. Nice to have, but sometimes we just need to delete a chunk off a screenshot, and it requires opening PS or taking a screenshot to edit anything.
- Wish there was a way to have "internal comments" that are not visible to our clients.
- Live collaboration.
- Works across Mac/PC.
- Public share links.
- Sketch integration.
- 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.
Freehand is the least polished of the bunch. It doesn't instantly make your thoughts and design look sexy. It doesn't open up your designs to be edited live, inspected, and sliced up for export. It doesn't let you interact with flow charts, like showing or hiding long pieces of text. Text containers don't expand automatically to fit your text — it's the other way around. So you're often spending lots of little minutes fussing with ways to make it look better. i.e., I grabbed and scaled a group, but now the stroke is ridiculously chunky.
Do you think Freehand by InVision delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Freehand by InVision's feature set?
Yes
Did Freehand by InVision live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Freehand by InVision go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Freehand by InVision again?
Yes