How InVision Freehand improves collaboration and remote culture
By: Tevi Hirschhorn
Tags: Startup, Collaboration, Design Thinking, Team Building, Remote Working

How InVision Freehand improves collaboration and remote culture

Yesterday, I was invited to attend a workshop hosted by Eli Woolery, of the Design Better podcast, and a handful of other InVisioneers, along with a small group of other product and design industry veterans.

I hadn’t planned on writing about the workshop, but the massive Figma update totally killed my momentum and productivity today, and so, instead of knocking out user scenarios, I’ll tell you a bit about Freehand, and how it’s such a fantastic tool for facilitated brainstorming, as well as a fun way to improve the culture of remote work.

I’ve enjoyed using Freehand on occasion, and some of my product manager friends absolutely love it. There were some features I felt were missing, but in this workshop, it appears like most of those gaps were closed, with major new features being announced soon.

I will start with talking about how Freehand is such a great tool for remote culture, in ANY company or team. Not just for designers. Then, I’ll discuss some of the killer ways Freehand is great for facilitated brainstorming.

Let’s just get something out of the way:

Freehand is *FUN*!

I don’t know what it is. There are so many whiteboarding apps out there. But there’s something about Freehand that just delights. The slightly uneven linework feels authentically natural, as if drawn by hand. Subtle animation feels good and right. And it was just so cool when I zoomed out watching 15 other people put reactions on the group’s favorite ideas. The twinkling animating reactions popping all over the screen was just straight up magical!

all the twinkling reactions

Maybe I’m jumping the gun, though.

What is Freehand?

InVision created Freehand as a group whiteboarding tool. You can share a link to a group, and all get in there, sharing thoughts, sketching ideas, making some sticky notes happen. It feels like you’re all standing in front a massive infinite whiteboard.

You can draw, use sticky notes, and type, and it’s all super smooth and fun.

How can Freehand help remote culture?

With today’s predicament of remote work being forced on society due to covid-19, improving culture, bringing people together, and team building activities have taken a big hit.

One of the major recent improvements to Freehand, is the massive template library, which makes jumping into Freehand easy as pie. On our workshop, we started with the Icebreaker template which let everybody take turns drawing facial features, and we compared each team’s resulting portraits. The template also had other forms of these kinds of games, including Pictionary. It was a lot of fun to watch everybody drawing!

screenshot from the Icebreaker template

Did somebody say TeMpLaTeS?!

Yes I did! Getting started with Freehand is super easy with all the pre-built templates. But it’s not just easier, the template library helps you see all the other ways you can use Freehand for design thinking and brainstorming sessions.

Yes, I did say, “Templates.”

Some of the templates probably don’t seem appropriate for Freehand at first glance. Like, I thought it strange a team might choose to use Freehand to ideate data architecture schematics, instead of using a tool specifically designed for flowcharts.

But as I thought about it, I realized it’s actually great. Because Freehand makes it so easy for anybody on a team to jump in and contribute to an idea, it democratizes participation, just like on a real marker board. There’s no barrier to entry.

It makes sense then to use Freehand for a group session, even for something like an AWS sketch, and then a polished deliverable can be created later after decisions have been made.

I personally wish there was tighter integration from Freehand sketch to finished project, so recreating everything from scratch isn’t necessary. It’s one of the reasons I usually use Figma for these kinds of things. But, notably, my non-tech-savvy partners and stakeholders all find participating in a Figma group document too cumbersome and confusing. I usually spend some time before meetings to walk through how it works, and there is usually still some friction during the meeting.

I also wish there was a component library in Freehand. Instead of requiring me to copy and paste a sketch shape from a template, I wish there was a “common objects” or “wireframe shape” accessible from the toolbar, just like typing, drawing and sticky notes.

That said, it was super easy and fun to work with the group, and I think I’ll be including Freehand into my workflow more and more!