Item: Ion, by Rock Content
Rating: 7
Author: Jesse Bond

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At our company, we are using Ion Interactive in the creative services (subset of marketing) department to create interactive landing pages, quizzes, and assessments to have more engaging online destinations to send our potential customers and hopefully get them closer to a sale. The biggest problem it addresses for us is that we are a very small team, and we don't have the manpower available to create the interactive websites that our internal clients desired--so Ion is an effective shortcut for us, only requiring a single designer/developer to build what we need.

Pros and Cons

large template library
easy to re-use chunks of things you build in other projects
great chat support

no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned

Return on Investment

Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Alternatives Considered

Honestly, we did not evaluate competitors--we had an influential new member of our marketing team come in with previous experience using Ion from another company, and after checking it out/evaluating it, we did their sandbox demo and found it to be very usable...and what we built during that demo time (15 days) was well-received internally, pushing things forward toward purchase

Other Software Used

Marketo, Adobe Acrobat DC, Workplace by Facebook (Formerly Facebook at Work)

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a great gap filler for a team like ours who don't have enough development manpower to keep up with interactive webpage demands but has at least one person knowledgeable enough in HTML/CSS and design to use a GUI and code where necessary to achieve the desired outcomes. If you do not have someone on staff who has that level of web development knowledge, it would probably not be nearly as useful to your team--however, if you have a lot of budgets to work with, Ion will build entire project for you at an additional cost.

ion interactive, a great shortcut for interactive web content--if you have an on-staff developer

Overall Satisfaction with ion interactive