Project Overview
As Covid-19 made digital product design more essential, better design processes and practices became that much more important. Freehand, InVision’s virtual whiteboard, is a core component of the InVision platform and is the tool that allows collaborators from every area of the business to join together, enabling fluid visual collaboration across team members throughout the design process.
This year, we’ve made all of this easier and more engaging than ever, with new sticky notes, version history, emoji reactions, easy voting tools, exporting capabilities, shape locking, and popular templates like brainstorming and wireframing, all within the ecosystem of the entire InVision platform. Together these features create a complete visual communications experience, which is often more powerful, pleasant, and rewarding than a verbal or typed exchange. Freehand, preferred by some of the most prolific product teams, stands apart from its competitors because of its simplicity and how it feels like an inclusive space.
The mission of Freehand is to be as easy and welcoming as possible to every contributor. It invites everyone to be creative and feel at home. From the beginning, we operated with the belief that streamlined and intuitive design fosters more creative collaboration, diversity of thought, and participation. And we’ve been proven right via our teams that use Freehand constantly and in conversations with customers, including all 100 of the Fortune 100 as well as Salesforce, The Home Depot, Deutsche Bank, and Microsoft Gaming. We’ve seen triple-digit growth since March 2020.
Organisation
Project Brief
The best way to build a superior virtual whiteboard for a remote organization is to be a remote organization that builds a virtual whiteboard!
When Clark Valberg founded InVision, he saw the need for a rapid prototyping product. The tool he created, also called InVision, made it simple to link screens together without code. With a tool like InVision, you can make your idea come to life and get it in front of users before the day is done. But, it soon became clear the platform also needed a place where collaborators from across the entire organization could draw, share, and review together. Enter Freehand, the virtual whiteboard for team collaboration.
While this was happening, InVision had atypical growth. From the beginning, InVision was fully distributed. InVision’s team needed to virtually collaborate and ideate in the same space, without physically being in the same space. Freehand became the solution.
We believe that the power of Freehand is not visible but felt. This principle was on full display as we launched a slew of new updates in spring 2020. Remote work is the new normal and our customers—who have also been rapidly investing in their digital products in unanticipated ways—are faced with completely new communication challenges. Demand for Freehand skyrocketed from design teams, engineering teams, and from HR, marketing, and IT teams. We saw entirely new customers who were turning their focus on digital products for the first time, and teams that needed to rethink existing features for a new world.
Project Need
When the pandemic first hit, companies needed to figure out how to meet. While historically teams were reluctant to collaborate virtually, suddenly, it was a necessity. As we’ve adapted to this new normal, it is now, in many cases, preferred. It’s faster to organize, removes location as a barrier, and integrates collaboration tools that make work actionable. Virtual meetings is just one example of a digital replacement surpassing the analog original. The same is true for the traditional whiteboard. Our version, Freehand, is uniquely integrated into the entire design workflow, acting as the design-thinking point of origin for teams at thousands of organizations.
Traditional whiteboards are static. You can take a picture of it, but you can’t edit it without erasing, replacing, and repeating. You’re limited to the physical space. You can’t present and focus the team on one area of the product. You can’t engage in a democratic, multi-player experience in person. And you can’t move your product designs in and out of it from prototype or raw design form, either.
We embraced old-school simplicity to make the virtual whiteboard feel as IRL as possible. Digital product design teams can work simultaneously or share asynchronously, import images, and scale to the infinite canvas. Diversity of thought and accessibility are critically important for teams that create products that impact how we interact with our devices and our world, and creating a safe and distraction-free product that gives everyone the confidence to interact is the most important step to getting there.
User Experience
These are the five main principles that drive the Freedhand experience; we’re inclusive, not selective, we use good defaults, not features, the experience is contextual, not global, we predict intention to avoid adding options and the speed of expressing an idea is more important than visual perfection.
First and foremost, we built Freehand to be fun. This is critical. If it’s fun, it will be widely adopted within a company, therefore centralizing collaboration. It’s also intuitive, fast, and dead-simple. Everyone is already “trained” on Freehand, eliminating onboarding and getting teams to work immediately. Another key differentiator for Freehand is the ease it creates; you can easily start a new whiteboard at freehand.new or by using our easy Slack integration. It was also built to be fast. It adaptively shows you only the controls you need. Quick shape tools, for example, only appear when needed and easily ideate in a polished yet organic way. Using the pen feels natural, just as a real pen would. It's a design that’s so good, you don’t notice it.
Other intuitive design choices include double-clicking on an image to enlarge it, driving a presentation like a slideshow, clicking someone’s icon to see their viewpoint, and adding anchor points to start conversations. One of Freehand’s signature features is Presenter mode. All viewers can follow along seamlessly as a design is presented, adding their input in a productive, actionable way. We’ve built in dozens of other hot keys that come naturally to any user.
Project Marketing
One of InVision’s main pillars is to reduce friction between teams, people, and the tools they use. Freehand exemplifies this. It isn’t a design tool—it’s a collaboration tool that’s essential to design. The best marketing in the world is about creating products and experiences that people love. InVision is the platform used by more than 7 million people to build memorable digital product experiences that drive advocacy, virality, and bottom-lines. We do the same for our own marketing.
For those who are looking to understand and uplevel their organization’s design maturity, we diagnose challenges and opportunities with our Design Maturity Assessment. This year, we worked with teams as large as 100,000 to help them uplevel their skills and improve across all nine maturity dimensions. We provide expertise in the form of our 2020 Webby-nominated Design Better Podcast, which as of this year is in the top 1% of all podcasts.
We publish books downloaded thousands of times. In the past year, we released three handbooks on the topics of Remote Design, the Business of Design, and the emerging field of Design Engineering. Our blog, read by 3 million, examines the craft and culture of digital product design and its new seat of power in business. Our films division creates and distributes documentaries on the topic of design and digital transformation. Our latest feature-length film, Squads, is currently being virtually screened by dozens of global companies alongside remote panels for groups as large as 3,500 viewers.
Project Privacy
Our products help our customers create digital products that are the lifeblood of their companies. A breach of their critical data and designs could put them at a terrible competitive disadvantage and expose products that are priceless. Accordingly, we take our customers’ privacy and security extremely seriously. The entire InVision platform uses the latest, industry-standard best practices to ensure our customers' critical work is never at risk. We also provide configurable security enhancements to each of our customers to help them efficiently adhere to organizational and compliance standards.
Here’s a brief breakdown of how we work to protect our customers’ data; secure by design, encryption, network, and server security, distributed denial of service protection, website application firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, advanced container security tooling, endpoint security, role-based access control with provisioning and authentication continuous monitoring, data retention, and disposal, incident response, disaster recovery and business continuity, vendor management, compliance.
We also have service security; dedicated namespace, IP whitelisting, audit logs, user provisioning, and de-provisioning, user authentication and access, session timeout, and document sharing controls.
We hold ourselves to the highest standards, and so do others. We’ve been awarded compliance certification, attestations, and frameworks from AICPA SOC 2 and 3, EU/U.S. Privacy Shield, PCI DDS, and many more big names in security.
Digital - Business Operations
From managing personnel, project management and customised apps and tools for specific business processes and tasks, what will stand out here will be those that make it easier for businesses to run both day to day operations and improve their business functionality and efficiency.
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