Best Design Studio: Large
InVision
InVision's Design System Manager
Digital - Business Platforms | Creator: InVision | Commissioner: InVision
InVision’s innovations in 2020 were all about empowering teams to create amazing, company-saving and strategy-shifting products that consumers would love—and produce them at scale to meet market demand. InVision’s innovations in products, processes, and know-how drive toward that aim.
This year, thousands of organizations came to InVision looking to increase and scale their design capabilities, and we responded with strategic updates targeted at their needs. Companies need to make digital product design more efficient and cohesive across touchpoints. Our new Design System Manager (DSM), launched in August, allows teams to easily leverage reusable components and not reinvent the wheel. At the most essential level it’s an accelerant of digital product development, and its adoption and use allows both large and small companies to expand digital workflow and brand consistency.
This product is fundamental to our platform going forward because it unlocks true collaboration. DSM enables designers, developers, and others to collaborate seamlessly and quickly, removing barriers to communication and high-friction handoffs, while letting teams establish a system of components together so they can build much more fluidly. Our team also brought in key new design system consulting stars who have literally written the book on design systems, and for every new DSM customer, we embed these experts to lead a new kickstarter program that gets the customer up and running quickly. Companies that use our platform get their products to market 30% faster on average—and they can do this just as easily remote as they can in-person.
Freehand
Digital - Business Operations | Creator: InVision | Commissioner: InVision
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.
InVision
Digital - Dev Platform/Dev tools/framework | Creator: InVision | Commissioner: InVision
Covid-19 put companies and their digital product design teams in a crisis, as digital products went from a high-ROI but ancillary revenue to many companies’ lifeline. According to McKinsey, adoption of digital products doubled in the grocery industry, increased by 60% in the entertainment industry, and increased by 40% in the banking industry. Retailers from Home Depot to Dominos saved their revenue streams—and their employees—by making their digital products central. They needed to achieve digital transformation at scale and on a vastly compressed timeframe in order to survive.
This combination of factors put unprecedented pressure on design teams. They were suddenly responsible for more than ever before. They needed to design faster and at scale. Whole teams of people needed to be involved concurrently.
InVision is the digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences. Today our customers include 100 percent of the Fortune 100 and thousands of organizations including American Express, Adidas, Boeing, Ford Motor, Netflix, HBO, Ikea, Peloton, Slack and Virgin Atlantic. InVision enables creative collaboration across teams and geographies for improved speed to market and powerful business results. Never has that been as critical a need than in 2020, and we are honored to offer our platform, our community, and our principles (our content and learning) to the teams on design’s front lines.
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