Project Overview

Collaboration can be powerful. It can also be a pain in the neck. Getting a raw idea out of your head and into someone else’s can be a tricky process. Gut feelings are hard to fit into words. Team members from different backgrounds can struggle to understand each other. Good ideas get lost because people are too intimidated by the process, the tools, or each other.

The collaborative process is fluid and spontaneous, but traditional tools like Word documents and PowerPoint slides aren’t. So they slow progress and limit possibilities. When it comes time for the team to build rough ideas into bold concepts, the small details (Jira tickets, Asana tasks) are too scattered, while the big picture is too structured. In a time when speed is table stakes and remote is here to stay, collaboration needs to mean more than just seeing the same page at the same time.

We built Freehand to transform the way you work together. What sets Freehand apart is not a thousand specialized bells and whistles for power-users. What is special about Freehand is the way it puts people at ease, encourages their creativity, and elevates their individual voice so that every member of your team can contribute meaningfully. Collaborating in such an easy and inclusive way unlocks the specialized knowledge, insight, and inspiration of your team so that you can deliver incredible digital experiences for your customers. Freehand is a powerful collaboration tool masquerading as a deceptively simple whiteboard.

Organisation

InVision

Team

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. Remote and hybrid is now the new normal and our customers—who have also been rapidly investing in their digital products in unanticipated ways—are now faced with completely new communication challenges. Demand for Freehand skyrocketed from design teams, engineering teams, and more broadly 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 an entirely new world. Last week, InVision announced it will be offering Freehand for free to companies large and small through September 30, 2021. After that, InVision will provide both a free and a paid plan. For organizations with advanced collaboration and security needs, Freehand Enterprise is available today. All this comes alongside a dedicated home experience for Freehand documents and a Freehand guided tutorial.

Project Need

2020 was a crash course in digital collaboration for the world. As experts in creative collaboration, visual communication, and remote work, we’ve studied the nuances of what worked and what didn’t, what was missing and what was actually better. Freehand is built on four pillars that rang out as the qualities most likely to help people change the way they work together:

Freehand is easy. Yes, it’s faster to just add more buttons, layer on more features, and let people work their way around the learning curve. But we designed freehand to be simple and intuitive so that it feels familiar the very first time you try it. That way you spend more time contributing than figuring out how to contribute.

Freehand is welcoming. No one likes to feel like they’re imposing on someone else’s territory. Freehand is common ground that levels the playing field so that everyone feels both entitled and enabled to share.

Freehand is fun. Freehand’s playful approach sets a forgiving, non-judgemental tone right from the start. That helps people to lower their guard, share more freely, and take more risks.

Freehand is professional. Versatile enough to meet the team's needs as the project evolves, dynamic enough to integrate with the team's favorite tools. All with the best-in-class security practices that have made InVision the go-to choice for 100% of the Fortune 100.

User Experience

These are the five main principles that drive the Freehand 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
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 presentation 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

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.

In addition to allowing our platform’s long-standing success to market itself, we create leading education and community programs for digital product design and development teams.

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 2021 Webby-nominated Design Better Podcast, which as of this year is in the top 1% of all podcasts. Upcoming guests include luminaries in our field: Seth Godin, Brian Chesky, and John Maeda.

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, career, 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
Service Security
Dedicated namespace
IP whitelisting
Audit logs
User provisioning and deprovisioning
User authentication and access
Session timeout
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.