Most of the collaborative magic in product development happens beyond the screen design tool. It’s the team planning, workshops, sprint reviews, and more. And that’s one of the reasons the pandemic has been especially frustrating for product teams. After years of hard work breaking down silos, you’re swiftly back at square one: trying to brainstorm, plan, and align in isolation. Now more than ever, it’s important for everyone to have a voice, but dropping into a design tool can feel intimidating for people outside of design and prevent them from sharing their unique perspectives.
Thankfully, there’s a way to get back to that special, collaborative experience (and even improve upon it): Freehand—InVisions’ real-time online whiteboard. It makes it easy for teams to plan, brainstorm, and review together even when they’re miles apart. Since March, we’ve seen a 130% increase in active Freehand users. And to be as helpful as possible, we’ve listened to your feedback and released more than 20 new highly-requested improvements.
Today, we’re excited to announce our biggest update to Freehand yet—a new template gallery complete with inspiring contributions from industry leaders. Plus, you can now also create and share templates within your organization!
Leverage best practices from industry leaders with the new Freehand template gallery
From our research on the relationship between design practices and business performance, we know the most successful teams have a collaborative culture. But the magic of inclusive design and collaboration shouldn’t be available to only the most mature product organizations. Teams of all sizes and experiences should be able to adopt these practices.
That’s why we’ve partnered with 20 industry leaders on Freehand’s new template gallery. This collection of proven frameworks will help your team learn from these leaders and turn breakthrough collaboration moments into repeatable practices for your whole team.
Choose from a customer journey map template from American Express, a product planning template from IBM, a marketing project plan template from Asana, an empathy map template from Dave Gray, and more. Explore the entire Freehand template gallery.
A few of our favorite templates
Generate ideas with the Xbox Design team’s free-flowing template
Give everyone a voice in your next brainstorming session. The team at Xbox created this brainstorming template to engage design and product stakeholders in a simple, inviting ideation exercise.
Untangle tough problems with AWS’s architecture brainstorm template
Created by David Cowden, senior solutions architect at AWS, this architecture brainstorm template helps keep customer requirements in sight while you collaborate on potential architecture solutions.
Organize your insights with UserTesting’s affinity diagram template
Created by research experts at UserTesting, this affinity diagram template helps organize your qualitative insights into memorable themes and takeaways.
Run collaborative sprint planning sessions with Atlassian’s sprint planning alignment template
Created by the agile transformation thought leaders at Atlassian, this sprint planning template will help you run more productive weekly sprint meetings.
Create your own templates, too
Alongside these inspirational templates, Enterprise customers can now create their own templates to share among their team. To help your organization foster best practices, the templates your team creates will live in a dedicated category and be available for anyone internally to use. Interested in taking advantage of this update with InVision Enterprise? Get in touch.
With the new Freehand template gallery, you and your team will discover better ways of working together throughout the product development process. We’re excited to see how you adapt these templates and create new, innovative ways to collaborate.
Want to contribute a template to the new gallery? Share what you’ve created here.
by Jeff Chow
Jeff Chow is Chief Executive Officer at InVision where he is leading efforts to reimagine how organizations work by bringing visual collaboration and inclusivity to full organizations. Prior to InVision, Jeff led product and product design for the Consumer Experience group at TripAdvisor, was product lead for Google's Newsstand experience (now Google News), and also founded and ran several startups in the mobile, consumer, and marketing spaces.
