Shaun Rance is the Director of UX at 72andSunny, a full-service advertising agency whose clients include Google, Starbucks, and adidas. Under the Interactive division, Rance leads a team of designers and developers to create branded digital experiences across a diverse set of platforms—from mobile and web to VR.
The team is required to move quickly and juggle multiple projects, without compromising on world-class design. They must also keep clients informed and happy, without sacrificing agility.
From the moment Rance joined 72andSunny in 2016, he knew his team would need a cutting-edge design process to handle it all. That’s when he introduced them to InVision Enterprise.
Bringing design leadership to his teams
Rance’s been prototyping in InVision for years, and introduces it to new teams wherever he goes, including at 72andSunny. Why InVision?
“The simplest way to put it,” Rance said, “is it’s the easiest way to rapidly create clickable prototypes and convey the intent of experience, whether in the ideation stage or when sold through to clients and in a regular workflow of making updates.”
“Prior to InVision, trying to communicate interactivity through screens was a nightmare.”
The switch to Enterprise
Though Rance was first introduced to InVision as a rapid prototyping tool, over the years he’s discovered it’s capable of much more—collaboration in particular. By the time he joined 72andSunny, he knew that for the company to fully benefit from InVision’s collaboration features, he’d need to switch to Enterprise.
“The big reason for us to move to Enterprise was to have fine-grained user permissions and controls, so we could add people on per project basis.”
Transparency keeps clients happy
Rance said being able to invite others into the design process with InVision Enterprise’s user roles not only helps his teams collaborate better—it helps 72andSunny keep their clients happy too.
“Once we have a concept locked, it’s very easy to add clients to InVision as reviewers and then do our design presentations in InVision,” Rance said. “The ease with which we can update those prototypes means we can send links in an email, and still rest assured that they have the most up-to-date files. We know everyone’s looking at the latest and greatest.”
Selling clients with a vision
Rance says that InVision plays a role even in the earliest stages of a client relationship, especially during the proposal phase. Making their proposals more sophisticated with InVision prototypes has helped the team win more business, with minimal time investment.
“InVision has proved invaluable in being able to win new work,” Rance said. “We can quickly and easily design out screens for a proposed experience and put together an interactive prototype to share with clients for new business work, and they can fully comprehend the intent of the new experience.”
“It’s definitely proven to be one of the most effective selling tools.”
Keeping the team in sync—and worry-free
The business benefits of InVision Enterprise are significant, Rance says. But for him personally, what’s made life easiest is how InVision has improved his team’s day-to-day design process.
Take the problem of version control. With such a large team, and so many projects, it’s easy for version control to become a logistical nightmare. However, with InVision Enterprise’s unlimited storage, revision history, and syncing through Craft Sync, Rance says that the problem has been all but eliminated.
“InVision Enterprise has proved invaluable in terms of source control, and helping us keep all of our different files in sync,” Rance says. “And the fact that it does snapshots of files and allows you to go back and restore a file means that even if Photoshop or Sketch crashes, I don’t have to worry about erasing hours or days of work.”
Creating a seamless workflow via integrations
Gaining buy-in across teams for a new design tool or process can be challenging. Fortunately, Rance said InVision Enterprise solves this with its deep integration with his team’s existing stack.
“There were tools in the past that allowed for adding interactivity, such as Axure or Balsamiq, but the things those tools lacked was the ease of integration into existing 2D design tools. You had to buy into their proprietary means of design. That made them very cumbersome.”
“The ability in InVision to quickly and easily work from our existing 2D design tools was a big reason we use InVision.”
Supporting long term business goals
Rance’s team’s embrace of InVision Enterprise is not just about building better products faster. It also reflects the company’s larger vision.
“The nature of the industry has changed. A few years ago, agencies were focused on branded experiences that were centered around a campaign,” he said. “Now we’re more focused on longer term strategic product development that helps brands engage with consumers over a long time period.”
According to Rance, InVision Enterprise helps them foster those relationships.
“The way we’re able to connect with our clients through InVision by making them active stakeholders and participants in the design and development process is very much aligned with the longer term partnerships we want to have with our clients.”
Want to build better products, faster and more collaboratively? Learn about InVision Enterprise.
by Ben Goldman
Ben is a Content Strategist at InVision. Before InVision, he co-founded the local news startup Blockfeed and served as a marketing consultant for early stage startups. In his free time, he writes sci-fi, daydreams about future technology, and makes chocolate chip pancakes for his wife and two kids.
