Lucidspark Reviews

I build iPhone applications, websites, and documents.

I use Lucidspark for presentations with wireframing and brainstorming. When I am creating a new application for our smartphones, I like to create each one of my windows and then figure out the best way to organize them, i.e., the best sequencing. A lot of times, by putting them in a kind of giant mine node like this, I am able to figure out what I am missing and what goes from page one to page two. It is easy for me to figure out what I need. 

I use both Lucidchart and Lucidspark. I was hoping that having both of them would be a combination because there are parts of each that I like. For example, I like Lucidchart, but I like the way that Lucidspark has a larger piece of real estate, i.e., it goes on forever.

Lucidspark enables me to prioritize ideas. That is why I like it. I like the fact that Lucidspark allows me to move forward with my projects in a way that I couldn't do without it. It is a fantastic tool for me. I use this solution every single day. Though, I don't use it the way that a lot of other users use it. 

The whole reason why I use Lucidspark and Lucidchart is because of the way that I collaborate with other people, e.g., if I send somebody a document that it is more difficult to use because I have to convert everything to a PDF. With Lucidspark, I can give them a link. They can open it up, then they can move things around. That is very helpful. That is one of the reasons why I like using it. It's kind of like Basecamp with art.

The containers are really great. I think they are wonderful. I like the containers because they are really the shape of a screen. That makes me happy. Originally, when I was working with the program to build screens, I was drawing my own screen, then copying and pasting it. The containers are fantastic just for that. 

Even though Lucidspark is the only one that I have found that allows me to do what I want to do, the program doesn't have enough to actually make it easy for me. For example, I will create a screen in whatever program, e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, or a text program, where there is a lot of text that I have to work with. When I place all these screens on my real estate in the program, it's great for me to help sort things out. However, unless I rebuild each screen in Lucidspark, I can't edit anything. So, I have to move things around, then I need to go back into my other program, make the edit, and then bring the image back. That is frustrating. 

It would be really nice if I could just click on it, then it would open up whatever program it was created in. Much like a link in Word or Excel, where you click on the actual file, then everything gets updated. That feature doesn't work with this program. For example, if I bring in images when building, I have to bring them in as a screen grab, JPEG, or something like that. Then, it is just really a piece of artwork in the program. It is not editable, and that makes it difficult going from my original wireframe to their mind map to the next stage.

One of the reasons why I moved to Lucidspark from Lucidchart was because of space. If I am going to rebuild all my screens so I can actually edit them in Lucidspark or Lucidchart, I have to make them almost full size. If I am going to make them full size, then I need to be able to pan out so I can see everything, which is probably like a 100x100 inch document. Now, I can get my whole document in and it is editable, but it is huge. Then, when I want to print it, it's very hard for me to give it to somebody. When I give it to my client, they can play around with it on a screen, but sometimes they like to print out the pages, tape them on a wall, and look at them. They can't do that unless I take the whole thing, make it into a PDF, and cut it into pieces. 

It would be great if Lucidspark and Lucidchart were one program. I find that a lot of the templates that you use in Lucidspark are great, but there is not enough for me to create useful artwork. I would like it if there was a way for me to add a style so I don't have to go in and select a color every single time, "Select the text, go into the color palette, and find the color." It would be nice if I could just say this is not a headline, but a certain style, and then I could just click it to something. Then, when I change that style, it changes everywhere in the document. These things might be there and I just don't know.

I have three screens that are literally just a vertical-oriented rectangle because it's going to be a screen for an iPhone. On the first screen, for example, I have it named as 00login screen. My second screen is 01login. The next one is 03join, or whatever it is. But, if I move these around in a document, I have to then go in and update all my numbers. It would be nice, when I move things around, if all the numbers changed again. I spend a lot of time just renumbering diagrams within the page. Because I have a page that is 100x100 inches, it is huge. That is not even at full size. That is about a quarter size. So, I spend a lot of time just changing the names and colors of things to make everything seem correct. This is really only to show a client and that is very difficult because this whole exercise that I am doing is really only to get somebody else to understand what I have created for them, then let me know if there is something missing.

It is helpful for brainstorming and finding missing pieces, but the build of it is extremely time-consuming. I spend more time doing a Lucidspark exercise than a Lucidchart exercise. I don't really build a lot of flow charts, so I don't really need all the different shapes and things like that. I just need the ability to move things around.

It is nice for me to be able to put each page in a document or website visually. However, once I start to go up from a wireframe where I have just a page with its name to a higher level version of it, where I have the data on the page and not just the page name, it starts to become less helpful. Now, I have to actually build the page in Lucidspark instead of bringing my page in and just putting an editable page within the program. I would like it if the program was really just a place for me to put all my stuff. If I could just take my Photoshop pages, bring them in, and then move them all around, that would be so easy and I wouldn't have to rebuild anything in the program. I could just use the program as a place where I keep all my stuff. Then, when clicking on a page, if it brought me back to my original document, I could edit it and then it would update it. That would be the perfect document. That would be wonderful. But if I have to recreate everything in Lucidspark, then that is very frustrating.

The Sticky Notes are great, but it would be nice if I could take all my Sticky Notes and have them merged into a document.

I don't really want Sticky Notes as much as I want to be able to just write on the background layer of the program. If I build a bunch of screens, I want to write little notes on them. I do that with just text, which is fine. I bring in little screen captures and drop them on the side, but it would be nicer if there was almost a small, very simple word processor where I could just click on an image, then my word processing document pops up and I see all my text. For example, my image one would relate to text one, then image two would relate to text two. Then, I can print that out instead of having to go in and copy and paste all the texts from my stickies or little notes around the page, copying and pasting them all into a document. What I am doing is making a big text block. I just write in it, but it's not meant for doing that. So, I'm kind of using it for the wrong thing.

Layers would be great. They don't have a layer feature. When you have a lot of items in the same place, it is hard to pick them out.

It would be nice if I could add something to the container, so I can make my own. For example, if I had a group of shapes that I use on a regular basis. I could place them into templates and drag from that group. So, if I'm making a screen, I can drag a screen right onto my background, then it would be the way I want it. It would have a text box inside of it and a text box on top of it. It would be very useful for me if I didn't have to do every single thing. Right now, I take a container, which is just an image, and drop a text box on top of it. That is just a very time-consuming way of building. I have a text box on top of the name and a text box that I have to build from the bottom, then I have to copy and paste all the information from each of the boxes into a document later on. It would be nice if one of the images in my document was connected to something else.

I would like to be able to use it through the entire project, but then we're creating a project that does more than most of the user's needs. That makes it not probable that this will be the eventual outcome of the design of the program. However, it would be nice if it did more. It would be nice if I could do more complex designs on top of it.

As a basic program, it's fantastic. It's really great. However, I would like to not have to redraw my entire design or app in another program after I build it. So, I end up building the original program in Illustrator or Photoshop, then I make a new version in Lucidspark. That is very time-consuming because every time I make a change in one I have to go back into the other and make a change. There are a lot of different copies of things. Some things get lost, then you need to have people just checking to make sure that everything is the same in bulk. A lot of editing is really unnecessary. 

The arrows are not very neat. Sometimes, I will spend 20 minutes trying to make all the arrows lineup and go in the direction I want. It would be nicer if they had more tools to make that work. I know they do because there are some of the people that work in my group who don't have any of the problems that I do. However, there are other people who can't make an arrow.

I have been using it for only a few months.

The stability and availability are great. I didn't even know there was a desktop version of it. I originally went to get a desktop version of it and ended up using this web version, which has been fine because I'm very happy with it. 

As far as scalability for my clients and me versus the rest of the company and their clients, this solution works great because I can share this with an unlimited number of people and have an unlimited number of people giving me input. So, scalability in that respect is fantastic. 

Scalability in the project is not as favorable because I can't go to the next step in a project with Lucidspark because it doesn't have the ability to do full screens. It's really just more of the beginning of our projects, the organization of the projects, and the wireframing of the projects. Once we figure out where we want to be, then we move to a different program. 

The larger number of people who are part of a project are at the bottom of the funnel, when you're creating it. As you get closer to the finished product, the number of people involved in it decreases. When I'm at the bottom and starting, I could do this whole thing in Adobe Illustrator because my real state is unlimited. I can move things around the same way. I could actually build all of my screens in Photoshop and they would work perfectly. What I can't do is give a copy of Illustrator to every single person that I need to work with because it is cost prohibitive. With this solution, it's very inexpensive and I can have everybody playing around with the design when I get to the next level. I take this and then move it into Photoshop and Illustrator. That's when their program becomes less capable of handling my needs.

They are very responsive. That is really the most important thing to a software user - if you have a problem with the software, the builders of the software's help department are quick to respond. If I have something that I can't figure out, find on the Internet or in their FAQs, then I can send a note to the developers. They are very quick with a response, which is extremely important. This is one of the things that makes it better than OmniGraffle, who still hasn't responded to some of the things that I wrote. The beauty of this smaller company: As long as they keep responding, I will keep being happy.

Overall, this solution has affected the productivity of my working and brainstorming sessions. It did it in a way that everything else didn't do. It is the only program that I have stuck with. I have used four or five different programs. After building something in them, I left and came back to Lucidspark. Lucidspark is the way that I communicate with my clients.

Lucidspark is really awesome because I can do things that I could not do without it. 

It would be better if I didn't use Lucidspark at all and just used Illustrator and Photoshop, but it doesn't make sense for my projects to do that. It would remove a tremendous amount of steps, but it would cost a tremendous amount of money.

I started with Lucidchart, then I went to OmniFocus and OmniGraffle. I played with a bunch of other ones too. The problem with evaluating software when you are actually in a project is that you can spend more time evaluating software than actually doing your project. I love to evaluate software. I have a lot of fun rebuilding things in different programs, but it is a lot of back-end time.

My problem with the Omni solution is it's bloated. Lucidspark software is good enough. It could do things better, e.g., working in Illustrator versus MakeDraw. Illustrator has so many things that you don't need. I do a lot of work in just the text editor because Microsoft Word is just so bloated. It's great, but bloated. It is slow and takes a lot of time to get things done. Although the features are wonderful, the features that you don't need are just huge. 

With Lucidspark, it's really great for what I do, but it is a couple of features short of where the perfect program would be. However, I am not using it for what it is supposed to be used for. I'm kind of using it for something that is not really what it was created for.

One of the things that is great about Lucidspark is that it's very simple. It's very simple, yet you can do things that are very complex. Whereas, other programs, like OmniGraffle, are very complex to do things that are very simple. This solution is very simple and allows me to do things that are very complex, which is the way it should be. All those programs have so much bloat that is frustrating. When you are trying to be too many things to too many people, you start to have just way too much going on, then something gets lost because you can't constantly work for the world. You have to work for the main set of people using your program.

I haven't found another program that I really like as much as this solution. There are a lot of programs that I use on a regular basis where the company doesn't do anything other than work to the lowest common denominator, not for the people who really use it all the time.

It is a fantastic program. It is just limited.

Lucidspark's interface and intuitiveness are great. It is sometimes frustrating because things aren't where you think they would be, and then you find them. One of the problems I have is that you look in one area for all the things that you need, then when you're going through one of the help documents, you find out that, "Okay, the reason why you couldn't find that was because you were looking in the wrong place." While it is great, it would be nice if everything was in one place and I could move it to where I wanted it so I could make it easier for myself to use. Aside from that, I think it's a great program. 

I have looked at a lot of the videos, and I always find it amazing that I have done things in very complicated ways when I find out that there are people who are doing something similar but they are doing it in a completely different way. I guess this means that you have to read, and most people don't read. They just jump in, then they look for help later.

They are doing a great job. I really like their software and will continue to use it. I would just like some things to work a little bit better. 

Read before you use it. There is a lot of information out there that is very helpful and saves a lot of time. People like to jump into programs and play around with them. When you have a program with a simple interface, and all Lucid's programs are very simple in their interfaces, but they do a lot of complex things. If you don't know what the text tool can do, then it is really just for making words. You won't get all of the wonderful things that are built into a lot of these tools unless you read, and people don't read.

I spoke to some people while I was working on this project right now, and they were like, "You know what? This program is really great because I can type things, but I can't format anything." I said, "What do you mean you can't format anything?" I was like, "What's the point of having a text tool if you can't format your text? Of course, it's there. It's right on top of your text." They are like, "Really, I didn't see that." 

There are a lot of people who work with us that don't have any idea about what any of the tools do. That is very frustrating because people just don't read. I would suggest that users take a course. There is so much on Lucid's website. There are so many things available. They are not always easy to understand, but there is a tremendous amount there. I don't think they need to do anything they are not doing already. I think they're already doing everything, which is great. I think that you really can't train your customers. You have to just give them what they don't know so they know the right questions to ask.

I would rate Lucidspark as an eight out of 10. If I didn't have to rebuild everything, I would give it 10. Because I do, that is hugely annoying. 

I have experimented with using it for brainstorming and I have identified a use case that I want to use it for, but I haven't practiced that use case with it yet. That use case, which I am really excited about trying to use it for, is affinity diagramming, also known as the KJ mapping process.

Lucidspark definitely improved the productivity of our working and brainstorming session. The level of participation and collaboration was up, and people felt that they had a level platform for communicating their ideas and having their voices heard. It was definitely a major step forward from the other collaboration tools that we had at our disposal and was definitely equal to my experiences with in-person meetings.

The real-time collaboration has been valuable. People are able to get in and put their ideas on the chart, on the board, and have their input captured for use by the others on the team. 

Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard, for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts, is very helpful in that everyone has the ability to add their stuff, add their content, put their ideas down and, to a certain degree, avoid groupthink. That is one major advantage.

The user interface and intuitiveness are very friendly. Users pick it up very quickly and don't need a lot of training or education on it. It's fairly self-explanatory. The people that I worked with picked it up readily. But the people on my team, generally speaking, are technology-friendly. I can't say that would be universal, but it's not something that would require a whole lot of training for my environment, where my user base is all back-office anyway. Those people are fairly technology savvy.

We specifically sought to aggregate data and brainstorming and then to look at the ideas that seemed to have the most value. We were able to prioritize and identify productivity issues and move forward. Being a continuous improvement expert, I tend to use very specific tools for prioritizing, but the tools in Lucidspark did help us do that on a qualitative basis, very effectively. On a scale of "not important," "somewhat important," or "highly important," it would be somewhat important. There are times where we need to do that qualitatively with the team we're working with. At other times I really want to use a very robust, database-based approach and I would use an offline tool for that. But everything that we wanted and needed was there, to do what we wanted from that session.

The tool is very robust. I've got very limited experience, so I haven't noticed any immediate gaps to be dealt with other than, as a new user taking it up, along the lines of the educational training communications.

I did attend a Lucidspark training session, a webinar, and that was incredibly effective in communicating the opportunity to use the tool. On the Lucidchart side, they have a fantastic document-based tutorial and how-to educational module built into the application. I would love to see something like that on the Lucidspark side.

I have been using Lucidspark for the better part of one month. I have only been experimenting with it. I am not a commercial user. I've only been testing it for consideration in production. 

I have had no hiccups or complaints or issues in my limited use. There have been no outages or glitches or anything of note. We've only used it among my team of four people, with me as the continuous improvement coordinator and my team who are black belts.

It is uncertain at this time whether we will increase usage of Lucidspark. We were using it during our trial period but I don't know if the license agreement will include Lucidspark or not.

I understand that Lucidchart and Lucidspark are separate products, but to exploit the power that it offers, getting it into people's hands and then building on it from there, it would be good to see them packaged together, or priced in a way that they would be leveraged. That would be the only thing that would make it even better: to make it more accessible, easier, faster, and cheaper.

I have not had any need to use technical support.

All our previous tools have been offline tools. This is the first collaboration tool that I've used in a virtual remote environment.

We have collaboration tools. We use Google Suite in our business, so we have the Slides and the Docs and the Sheets and Google Meet. They've recently added a whiteboarding function and voting and the other things to compete with Zoom. I believe the whiteboarding function is intended to be that kind of collaborative piece, but I've not used it. It's only been recently released.

We use Lucidchart as the primary application in the Lucid suite. We use that more than even Lucidspark. It's a very user-friendly environment. All of the members of my team are very happy with Lucidchart because they do mapping for our constituents frequently. Lucidchart is very helpful, quick to use, and easy to produce the process documentation that we need to make.

My impression so far is that Lucidspark is more powerful than I am even aware of. It's got fantastic tools and methods with the tagging and some of the automated features for grouping and color coding. It will take time, practice, and repetition to take advantage of them.

Regarding virtual or remote sessions, when it comes to the activity and engagement levels of users, compared to in-person sessions, in some cases it's higher, but it's impossible to force everyone to engage, especially when remote. In an in-person session, you can visualize who's not engaging and draw them in. It's more challenging to do that with virtual collaboration tools unless you've got someone dedicated to looking for that lack of participation. As a facilitator, the virtual piece is challenging, but the fact that everybody can get onboard simultaneously is at least as involving as in-person.

Overall, I would definitely give it a nine out of 10. It's absolutely strong and more powerful than I am aware of. I'm ready to tap into it and would like to exploit it more.

Primarily, I was using Lucidspark for the whiteboarding and collaboration. The whole thing was initiated because I was trying to work using the workflow on LucidChart, which triggered me to have a kind of a collaboration meeting. Nowadays, because of COVID-19, everything is virtual. So, I thought it would be a good idea to collaborate over this collaborative whiteboard using my flow in LucidChart over to Lucidspark.

Lucidspark was pretty useful because of the integration feature available, e.g., what you do in Lucidchart can be easily rolled over to Lucidspark. However, I feel there could be more integrations built into it, which would help to bring in more easier integrations from work that we have done on other tools, like Jira or Confluence.

Because of COVID-19, we were not able to run our workshops in person because of the situation. This tool helped us run the agenda of our workshops during those times using its collaboration tool, which was pretty useful for us.

It positively affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions. It was definitely a saver for us because we wanted the agenda to be addressed as soon as possible. We were able to do that, and this solution was pretty useful for us.

I was able to consume what I had done on Lucidchart into Lucidspark.

I have used their sticky notes and free hand drawings. The Collaborator Colors feature is important just to be able to segregate individuals for the better interpretation of what you are putting up on the board. 

I found Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard useful, but I still felt there could be more features, like putting up presentations, creating frames, and being able to run it like a presentation. These things would make it better. If they could add more features for presentations and organizing the different sections of the board in a space, which is interlinked to how you can present them efficiently. This would be very helpful.

I started using Lucidspark very recently, for probably a month.

Performance has been fine. It has been pretty good, in fact.

I have not tested scalability.

I initiated it within my company. I'm a product manager. We did this workshop mid-December, and in the workshop, there were around 15 people.

We haven't used the support.

We have been using a couple of whiteboarding or brainstorming solutions. One is Conceptboard and the other is MURAL, which specifically has more collaboration with more features. For example, one of the features that I mentioned was integration with Bluetooth. So, MURAL has more integrations available. MURAL has the presentation capability as well, which is helpful. It also has more templates to choose from as a starting point. As a con, MURAL is just a whiteboarding tool, whereas Lucidspark has Lucidchart to help provide us a flow chatting tool as well, which kind of an advantage on the Lucid side.

Setting up and using it was pretty easy. The setup was just a few minutes. I was able to work soon after.

I personally had a hard time getting the licenses sorted out. In the organizational license, the whole process took a lot of time. Personally, I feel that the licensing could be done much better on that front.

Onboarding it was a challenge for me. They need to work a bit on making users stick to their platform, be it Lucidchart or Lucidspark, then engage them into any kind of paid services. Primarily, this will help people get stuck on their platform who will eventually use it, since they would have their work set up on it rather than the other way around. Instead of using both of these tools, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, I would recommend sticking with one or the other.

I personally believe in-person sessions are more effective for multiple reasons. You can sketch and draw ideas on a virtual whiteboard, but you cannot replicate the total creativity that comes out of a physical session workshop and what happens on a physical whiteboard. One reason is you cannot replicate the creativity that comes out of the whole environment when everybody is in the same room versus when everybody is collaborating over Zoom, or whatever meeting tools that you're using. Another reason is physical presence adds a little bit to the whole discussion as compared to being on a call or meeting on the Internet. Primarily, it is easier to see expressions, the involvement, and have more participation, as compared to a virtual platform where it is more on the individual to kind of take the lead.

I would not say that the tool itself helps prioritize ideas. Because at the end of the day, it is a collaboration platform and more based on the output of the workshop. The workshop helps you prioritize ideas, but I would not specifically credit that to just this tool, or any tool for that matter.

I would rate it around a seven to eight (out of 10). I still feel there is a scope for improvement, but it is pretty good as a baseline. If some things discussed in this review could be worked a bit on, I would definitely prefer using it.

I've used it for team meetings where we all collaborated on different things on the same project, and then I've used it to create a lot of process maps and things to illustrate ideas and processes for the team.

I am using their web-based solution.

We have been able to come together to easily share and display ideas and concepts in a faster and more well-rounded way than if it was to be done with PowerPoint or something simple.

We use the Collaborator Colors feature in which you can assign each user a certain color. It is very important because we can distinguish much easily where the ideas are coming from rather than having someone's name next to it. It is much easier just to recognize colors, especially if you're working in a small team of three or four where it's easy to know that blue is one person and pink is another, etc.

I like the templates that it comes with. I also like how easy it is to change colors and icons and just flip back and forth. It is really easy to maneuver and use.

It is very easy to understand, and it promotes a lot of collaborative thinking and recording of ideas.

I like Lucidcharts as well because you can collaborate well by sharing projects with each other. You can spend more time generating the content and ideas and less time in figuring out how to use the actual product, so there's a lot more productive time versus non-productive time when you're using both Lucidcharts and Lucidspark. It is easy to move your ideas from the idea stage to execution by using Lucidchart and Lucidspark. You can export your ideas to a PDF or save them to PowerPoint or something else. It is really easy to transfer them from the website or product itself into something that you can share with your team.

One of the things that I struggled with a little bit was navigating around the board. Because it's so big that when you want to find certain sections, it can be a little bit challenging to move the little box in the corner around to find where you are. If there could be more options to move around the board, that might make it easier. It can have a joystick version or something like that so that you could just manually move around, or there should be an option for a picture in the corner on which you click around to locate different items on the board.

I have been using Lucidspark for one year.

It is a stable, consistent, and easy-to-use product. As far as the performance goes, it is really reliable and easy to use. I don't think it is so overwhelming that you get slowed down in the weeds with it.

I've never had an issue with its availability. It is always available, and I like how it is easy to access through the web.

It can convert ideas to PDFs, presentations, and things like that, which makes scaling it up very easy. Once the ideas are presented on the board, you can use them in any format that you really want to.

It is available in our organization, and we have used it in a number of process improvement classes. It is used for classes that are taught by the organization and within my department. The directors and managers use it.

I use it probably three to four times a month, and I probably will increase my usage as I become more familiar with it and certainly train others to use it. Without the visual assistance that it has provided, it would be potentially complex to share ideas and concepts. It increases our collaboration and ability to share ideas and concepts.

I have not interacted with their technical support.

I used Visio to do similar things, and it was just very complicated. It took a lot of time to understand how to use it, whereas Lucidspark was very straightforward. I didn't have to spend a lot of time reading instructions or finding out how to do things. It is very user-friendly and intuitive as compared to other solutions I've used.

It was easy. It probably took just a couple of minutes to set it up, title it, and invite the collaborators. It was easy to do all of that.

I didn't evaluate other options. I had just used Visio before, and then I tried Lucidspark and liked it a lot better.

I would recommend it because of its usability. It is very easy, and you can spend all of your time generating ideas and content rather than just trying to learn the platform and how to use it. You can accomplish high speed and productivity through it, so I would recommend it.

The activity and engagement level of users during remote or virtual brainstorming sessions are comparable to in-person sessions. It is not as good, but it is much higher than just a discussion without Lucidspark. So, compared to in-person sessions, it is 75% more effective. It is certainly much more effective than if it was just being done on phone or through a virtual meeting without the Lucidspark board.

We don't use Lucidspark's integrations with third-party solutions. Lucid Suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console, but it is not necessarily an important feature for us. I am not sure if Lucidspark enables us to prioritize ideas. I haven't gone that far into it.

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of 10. There is a little bit of complexity in maneuvering around the board, but besides that, it is very easy and user-friendly.

What we've used it for so far is facilitating a couple of meetings.

We used it in a discovery gathering session with a client and they were all given the link to jump into the board. We gave them the ability to create and edit while we retained the overall power to move things and keep everyone focused. That was good and they enjoyed it. With COVID this year, they said it was a really great, innovative tool to use since everyone was sitting in their individual homes.

Using it with clients has really helped with the facilitation on our end, as the facilitators, but also for the clients who are using the process for the first time. We were able to get people in who are not super-technical to understand how to work it, and why we're using it. That actually went pretty fast and was an easy process.

People seem more engaged during virtual sessions when compared to in-person sessions. When I talked with the product owner of the product we're working on, in the most recent session we did, she said that all of her people really enjoyed it. She's been with her team for 13 years and they're getting ready to make a lot of changes. And even though everyone's apart she's said, "It was actually really nice to bring everyone together." Everyone was talking and having a good time and listening, and they were finding out things that all of them didn't like about their old system. And from my team's perspective, they said, "Oh, this is a fantastic collaboration tool." It allows for people to really feel a sense of "I'm engaged," and a sense that "the client hears me, and I'm listening to the client." It created a two-way street, more so than a lot of the time when you're in the beginning of a collaboration session in-person. In the latter situation, you're very much talking at the client. This cuts out that 10 minutes. Then you just say, "Okay, let's take a tour, and here's how it works."

Also, often, in an in-person session, you would go in with a predetermined amount of whiteboards to put sticky notes on. With this solution, if something else comes up that we didn't even think of, we can throw a quick new space on the board for that. That, alone, is nice on the virtual side.

Lucidspark also enables you to prioritize ideas. We used a couple of different functionalities that allow for that and we did enjoy that as a team. To be able to put things into various boxes or containers that I had created allowed for a much quicker process than trying to move sticky notes in-person. You're not walking across the floor.

It also has features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session. Once we close out a session, my team does an assessment of everything. We go over it with the client first, just to make sure that that is what they were saying. Then we go in and clean it up ourselves afterwards. Those features are good as we do a team debrief meeting. We are able to keep things moving and not take a lot of time trying to decipher things. That ability to tag or move things around really helps us.

In terms of patterns and themes, we were only really looking for pain points and wishlist items. We didn't go too deep into that space, but we did use it for that. We were trying to group things into various buckets within our client's current system, to share how their system is currently interacting, and what their issues are. It really did help us to pinpoint those things with better clarity. We could then go back to the product owner and ask her to validate each thing, and each was in a specific box. She could just look at them all and say, "yes" or "no." It did help very much.

The tagging means we're able to take everything from the board, the way we aligned it, and then transpose that immediately into a document for the product owner and all of the stakeholders. They can look at it, review it very quickly and validate, while using snapshots from within the Lucidspark board itself. The ability to automatically group ideas helps save time. 

Overall, Lucidspark has brought the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions up to a new level. All of my team felt confident. They enjoyed it. A lot of them said it was the best session that they've been in, ever. The product owner we were working with, a group that had never used a system like this because their organization is a government entity, was a little scared at first, but once we showed them how easy it is, they were loving it. That helped us and made me feel confident too: "Oh yeah, this is good." People enjoy this and it's something that we're definitely going to continue to use because of its ease, but also because of how it just allowed for everyone to feel, and to know everything was being recorded on the board. Nothing was lost or missed. And in terms of productivity, normally we would be holding about a two-hour meeting. We kept each of these meetings to 90 minutes because of the streamlining of the features.

For me, being able to drop things into the board has been the greatest experience. In the middle of conversation, when I'm facilitating, and especially if I don't have a second facilitator, I'm able to just drop things in and keep moving. That allows us, as the company overseeing the whole process for the innovation that's happening, to stay at a good pace. That's the best part. Those drop-in features have been excellent.

We used to use other products in the past to create similar end goals, but now we are able to automatically add in certain things. One of our biggest hindrances with other programs was Swimlanes. While you're in the middle of the meeting and someone says, "Hey, let's add Swimlanes," you can add them on-the-fly. You just click it and do it. That's been a really wonderful experience. It's not just Swimlanes. There are a lot of things where, while we're in the middle of a meeting with either a client or an internal meeting, we're able to collaborate altogether. That has really been a benefit of the product.

I like the Lucidspark user interface and its intuitiveness. One of the things I definitely enjoy about the interface itself is that I switch between a mouse pad and a trackpad. Just that factor, when you're trying to move things quickly and go to another spot on the board— because you're under a time constraint, especially with meetings today—is really helpful.

The virtual whiteboard is also absolutely fantastic. It has streamlined all of those aspects that we would have done via PowerPoints and other types of on-the-fly screen sharing that were used in the past. Now, everyone can be in the same space. That part of it really helps us to feel confident and allows us to be more engaged with the client and vice-versa, with the client being engaged with us.

In addition, the Collaborator Colors feature is important, especially when you have more than three people on a board, because otherwise you get lost. It allows for us to feel a sense that everyone is there. Everyone is not the same color, whereas with other systems they all have the same color, and that limits your ability as a facilitator. When they're all the same color you're having to go click on the actual tab and see who wrote what. So this is a very good functionality.

One of the things that was mentioned in the training is that they're working on some updates. I hope that one of the updates will be a zoom-in/zoom-out function that's a little different than what they currently have, just to make it flow better when you're trying to move in and out of the board. I know they're working on it and that would be great, once they get that together.

In terms of the engagement factor, we did get a little bit of feedback that it would be helpful to have some type of a training walk-through board from Lucidspark, a template for people who haven't used the solution.

The biggest lesson learned from using Lucidspark, for me, was getting everybody into the board and getting them comfortable. I looked through the templates and there isn't a "Getting To Know Lucidspark" template for people who are not licensed users. I learned that I needed to actually dedicate 15 or 20 minutes just to get people used to everything. Nobody knew how to use it so I had to get everyone up to speed. Once they were up to speed, they were fine and they were able to flow through it. That's something that I can say I need to do: to make sure I give more time for that, whenever I get another new client onboard with the solution.

I've been using Lucidspark for about two months .

The stability is great. It responds well when we have 10 or 15 people in the board at one time. Everyone was able to enter stuff in. It wasn't like there was any lag, and people weren't getting frustrated. That's my gauge. If people start getting frustrated with a system or an interface then you know there are issues. But none of that happened here.

I haven't used customer support for Lucidspark.

I didn't have any issue with the setup. I thought it was great. It was set up right away and it was not difficult. To get everything set up took an hour or so.

My company also uses MURAL. At this point, I think the company is going to keep both because some people like one system and some like the other system. I enjoy both. Both have very similar interfaces and each has its own functionalities.

The zoom-in/out feature I mentioned earlier is something that MURAL has. That is the biggest thing that Lucid can work on, and it sounds like they're doing that.

I also use Lucidchart as a business analyst. I create my business process models in there, as well as other types of modeling for other projects that I'm on. The Lucid suite is great because I can draw Lucidchart right into the Lucidspark board and grow it right there, especially if I'm looking for validation from clients. It allows for a much smoother operation for everybody. I can just say, "Hey, is this correct?" and they can validate the process model right there. It enables that process. And the connectedness between the two different programs that I use is great.

It's been very easy for us to move ideas from the idea stage to execution because we're able to visualize everything right there. From that point, we can just draw out the conclusions that we need and put that right into the development team.

We do a lot of whiteboarding.

Since we're in the IT field we have a lot of process maps that we draw and it's easy to collaborate with the team on a live Zoom or any conference call we have going on, where whoever is participating just throws their ideas onto the board.

A benefit is that anybody, across any platform, can collaborate anywhere. They don't need to have software installed, like with Visio.

The solution also enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and less time organizing them. Once we're ready, we take it to our leadership and the leadership might see something that we didn't see. They're able to easily move it around and say, "What if we move the process this way?" They can do it on their own time. We don't have to wait for them to join a call and do it. We just send it over, and then they'll revise it and send it back to us. It has made our working and brainstorming sessions very simple. It has cut down a lot of back-and-forth. We're able to get to the result in less time than we used to. It saves us at least one day per week.

The most valuable feature is the live, interactive whiteboarding. For brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts it's like Visio but much better, because it's online. Collaboration for process is much easier. Everybody else has more of a "sticky-notes" type of solution. But with Lucidspark, you're using visual diagrams and the icons and things that you need that are more like Visio.

In terms of the user interface and intuitiveness, it's easy to use even for a non-technical person. You just throw things on and, for whatever you need, there is drag-and-drop. You don't have to train anybody. Everybody, right off from day-one, knows how to use it and take it forward.

We also use the Collaborator Colors feature and with it we can see who has proposed an idea when we're on a live call. If it's me or if it's my boss who said, "Hey, maybe we should do this," we can say, "Yeah, that looks better than what Joe said," for example. Or we can say "Hey, Joe's ideas kind of make sense," and we can take mine out and put his in place.

In addition, it has ready-to-go boards for process. You convert them into PowerPoint or the like and export them very easily and plug them in. That's what we do, most of the time: We build the process map and, once it's ready, we export it and stick it into PowerPoints. We also build a lot of solution documents for different technologies and processes. We use the Lucid diagrams and put them into the solution documents.

You can also add pages. Once we like something on page one, for example, we drag it and move it to a different page where we're saying, "Hey, this is the final process for this."

And the fact that the suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console is very good, because then you're not tied down to a per-license model. Instead, it's more of a SaaS model, so if somebody leaves the team you can just reassign the license to their replacement.

We have been using Lucid products for years. We have been using Lucidspark since it was released about four months ago.

The stability is excellent. We haven't had an issue where it was down or we couldn't reach it.

It's easy to scale because it's not on-prem. It's cloud-based, so we just have to add licenses and reach out to our rep for Enterprise.

We have about 10 users of the solution. There's room to grow, obviously, but I don't see us doing so right now.

I have not used technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward because we use the SaaS model; nothing on-prem.

The process took us about four weeks but that was more due to our internal process because we had to get approval from InfoSec and everybody to make sure that there were no vulnerabilities in the software or anything that was getting installed, and that no data—client information, health information—was stored on the cloud.

For the deployment, on our side, there was just one person, but building and getting all the initial approvals involved about four people who are in InfoSec, IT, the leadership, and FP&A for the cost.

Not everybody uses Lucidspark on a daily basis. Some teams just use it when they need to build charts, once in a while. But we have seen a return on investment for people who use it on a daily basis, in terms of time and money savings, because we're not allocating licenses 100 percent. We can transfer a license on-the-fly. With Visio, if a person leaves the team tomorrow, you have already paid upfront.

There is room for improvement in terms of the cost. It should all be bundled together. It's becoming like a Microsoft, where you have to buy all the different version features separately. It should just all be bundled with one price. I shouldn't need to buy Lucidspark separately and Lucidchart, etc. That model is like what Microsoft does, and it's very annoying.

The only other options were Visio and Visio Online but they are both by Microsoft. They were not compatible with Mac and others. That's why it was easy to make the decision to go with Lucid.

When it comes to prioritizing ideas we use monday.com to prioritize our tasks at hand. Based on that, we use Lucidchart to bounce ideas around.

We have the full Lucidchart, the full Enterprise version, so that we're able to build process maps and everything else. I am mostly on the build side of things. We build the solution and then we hand off the solution document. We design how the process will look, on Lucid, and then we build it out and give it to operations to run. We don't really see when it goes live. But it helps the build side to collaborate and get to that point.

I think it's a great product. It's easy to use and there is not much hand-holding needed from an IT perspective. The SaaS model is great because it's cross-format. We're able to use it from our iPad or phones or from anything. It doesn't matter where we are.

I am a consultant to the financial services industry. I use Lucidspark for process development for the different contracts that I've got.

I run it on all of my devices including my desktop, iPhone, and iPad.

In terms of intuitiveness, the web-based interface is great. For iOS, I do not find it as easy to use. Trying to update documents on my phone, the screen is very small and that presents a problem. I've used it a couple of times on the iPad and I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, but it's taken longer than if I were to do it on the computer.

Lucidspark allows me to prioritize ideas, which is important to me. It is my main charting and documenting tool that I'm using for ideas that I have. 

The product allows me to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, rather than organizing them. This is something that is very important because I'm using documentation to help clients visualize the process that they have to go through.

Although I have only been using Lucidspark for a short time, I believe it's enhanced my brainstorming sessions and made them more productive. 

The most valuable feature is the different ways that you can build out the charting and the mind maps. There are various different templates that are included in the program.

It's nice to have the ability to go cross-platform. I use both iOS devices and PC devices, so that's really important to me. It's nice that I can do stuff from a mobile perspective because when I'm out of the office, I can still work on it. I'm not always working in my office location, so it's a nice function.

It takes me longer to complete the same task on mobile devices than it does on the desktop. It's not as big as a computer screen but it isn't just related to the screen size. It could be the operating system, which is the interface between the program and iOS. The computer I'm using is a PC-based computer, and it is seamless and efficient.

I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago and I wanted to do something. Using my iPad, it seems clunky and isn't as responsive as my PC. It was between 2 am and 3 am, and I was thinking about something that was noteworthy. I went to Lucid on my iOS device, the iPad, and I tried to put the information in. I couldn't get it in the way I wanted it to, and so I flipped over to another application and wrote the information down and then went back later in the day and got on the PC and put it back into Lucid that way. So, I did get some of the stuff into Lucid on the iPad in the middle of the night, but not a lot. Ultimately, I got frustrated and I thought that it was taking far too long. That is why I switched to the other application.

It would be nice if you could import things into Lucid and then manipulate them from there. For example, when I did work in the middle of the night, it was a text-based application. I had to re-type the stuff in the morning into Lucid. It would have been nice to be able to import it and then use the Lucid functions to manipulate the data.

One thing that might be beneficial to future potential users is for the vendor to extend the trial to like a two-week period instead of a one-week period. I started creating documents immediately because I had an immediate need, but if you don't have an immediate need, you might not be able to use it within that week. So, I would say extend the trial for two weeks to give the user a greater opportunity to test it.

I have been using Lucidspark for approximately two weeks.

On the PC, it works wonderfully. On the iOS piece, not so much. I don't use an Apple computer, so it might integrate better in that case, but it seems clunky. It's hard to manipulate on my iPhone, and it's easier, but not as easy on an iPad.

I've started using the scalability features, meaning my documents are getting much larger than they could ever get in the previous applications I was using. Now I've got documents with multiple pages and multiple processes on multiple pages. From that standpoint, it's fantastic because now the client can start by looking at the overview from a high level, then drill down into a particular section of the process, then down into the different steps involved in the process.

From this standpoint, scalability is great.

At this point, I'm the only person in the company using it. Within the next month, I'm probably going to introduce it to one of the organizations that I deal with.

I have not had a need to contact technical support.

I have tried four different solutions for this type of work, including Mind Map, Draw.io, and Visio. Of the few that I have gone through, Lucid is the one I'm using right now the most. The other ones didn't provide what I was looking for, just from a functionality standpoint and a documentation standpoint.

Visio is one that I used years ago and I just wasn't satisfied with the process to get things accomplished. It seemed that you had to read a manual and get training in order to effectively use it.

I have also used iOS-based applications including SimpleMind and Simple.io. These were iOS applications that could not work across different platforms and because I've got a PC desktop, I couldn't go back and forth between it and my mobile devices. These products were easy to use but I couldn't cross the interfaces.

Essentially, I've got four other programs out there that are becoming obsolete because of Lucid.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I've been using these types of products for probably six or seven years, or maybe more than that. From an intuitive standpoint, I knew what I was looking for and what I was going to do. It was fairly easy to set up the documents I wanted to set up, and then it was an intuitive process to go through and manipulate them the way I needed them to.

There's no special training and there's no need to read a manual before you use it. From that standpoint, it was nice.

From a communications standpoint, and from an ease of communicating with clients standpoint, I'd say that I have seen a return on my investment.

The pricing is in line with everything else out there, and you get what you pay for. I haven't looked at the enterprise-level pricing, as I'm subscribed with the individual or the small team pricing. That's comparable to what I've seen elsewhere.

It'd be great to have it cheaper, but once again, if you lose some of the functionality, it's not really worth being cheaper for that.

There was a list of perhaps 10 products that I evaluated. I printed them out, went to the websites, and looked at them. These were all of the big products and one of them that I recall is either Edraw or Draw.io. That is the one that I came closest to, but I chose Lucid over it.

I needed a robust charting, process, documenting program and that's why I chose Lucid. I looked online, I did a bunch of different comparisons of the stuff out there in the marketplace. When I looked at Lucidspark I thought that it looked to be the most robust for what I want to do.

The feature set that was documented on the Lucid website was what prompted me to start a trial. I didn't go into the trial of the Draw.io product. When I compared the features that were explained on the websites between Lucid versus Draw.io, it really motivated me to do the trial and then to become a subscriber.

I am using this product for high-level ideas right now but I haven't yet turned on the virtual whiteboard features. I've only been using it for a couple of weeks and I'm still getting comfortable with it. I can envision virtual whiteboards, which would be fantastic because right now I'm using Google Meetings and their virtual whiteboard while I'm in meetings.

I haven't yet looked at the virtual whiteboard, but I am hoping that there is a drawing feature embedded into Lucid. That would be fantastic.

I use it for brainstorming but not over the PC. I've basically done mind mapping and brainstorming for myself but I haven't used it in a collaborative environment yet.

I know that there is integration with Google available because it has come up on my screen, although I haven't used it yet.

My advice for anybody who is considering Lucidspark is to definitely give it a try and do the analysis. Overall, I think that this is a good product and my biggest complaint is because of the iOS interface.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My primary use case is for documenting processes. 

The Whiteboard session feature could be the most helpful feature. It can help my organization through brainstorming and design sessions for technical tools, systems, and solutions. It's hard to brainstorm remotely and this tool will help to facilitate that.

Lucidspark enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. We're spending the same amount of time working through all those items. It takes the same amount of time for us to use Lucidchart as it is to use Lucidspark.

The suite is really helpful at helping us to visualize each step of the process from brainstorming additional ideas to turning those ideas into reality. I'm speaking more to Lucidchart, but also Lucidspark. I use Lucidchart and Spark pretty often. The products in the suite easily convey processes to people. They're really helpful. I think they're great workflow tools.

It is pretty easy to move our ideas from the idea stage to execution using the vendor's suite of products. We use it pretty often too. We use it to convey how the technical solutions will actually impact a stakeholder. It makes it really easy for us to give our stakeholders something visual before we've actually built something.

The sharing feature is the most valuable feature. It's been really easy to share Lucidspark boards and documents with other people.

The Lucidspark app creates a web link and you can just copy-paste and give that to anyone, for anyone to view a flow chart or document you've created, it's just like a Google doc.

The user interface is pretty straightforward. I have no real complaints. It's pretty clear what I need to do and how to do it.

So far, Lucidspark and Lucidchart have been comparable products. Lucidspark has been helpful, but it feels like there are products that can replace it and that I could use that work just as well.

The tool felt pretty similar to Lucidchart and I wasn't a super avid user of it. A lot of the features were pretty similar. I feel like they were pretty straightforward. I didn't run into any issues. And even in terms of non-issues, like enhancements, I feel like there wasn't anything I could really think of that would be helpful to improve the tool.

Creating the documents was pretty straightforward. Lucidchart has templates. I didn't use the template feature, but that was something that I wanted with Lucidchart that I saw that they had in Lucidspark, but I didn't use.

I have been using Lucidspark for two months.

It is very stable.

It is pretty scalable. It felt like it matched a lot of the same structure as Lucidchart in terms of how they organize their documents. 

One of the other team members who uses it is a software developer. He helps to build and design technical shelves for submissions. I use it in my role as a manager of the business systems team. I help with the use case that I use it for which is for business analyst work that is documenting requirements and sharing process flows for the business.

It does not require any maintenance. 

We did not use it that extensively and currently have no plans to buy a license. It looks like a helpful tool for the Whiteboarding component, which I'd love to use in future meetings, but I think they have a free version that I'm looking at now. 

I have also used Google Sheets. I chose Lucidspark because of the free trial.

The initial setup was straightforward. I just got a license and then logged in and it was an easily true SaaS product. The moment I had the license and was able to log in, I was able to access the product and immediately start doing stuff.

If we were paying for the solution, I would definitely expect to see some return and the return would be in terms of efficiency gains. The main reason I'd want to use it is to make it easier for my online team to communicate, discuss, and brainstorm with each other. If it's subjectively easier to do that, then that feels like a return to me. It would be around 5% to 10% of a return. 

There are licensing fees for some of us to use it, but I'm not sure what they are and I don't remember encountering it during the trial.

It has not affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions too much. We recently did a big overhaul on our Salesforce system for some of our logic and one of our offshore developers used Lucidspark to explain how he designed the solution that just made it really easy for us to understand. He used documentation as the technical design.

My advice would be to use it more. Use it more than I did specifically for the Whiteboarding design and scrum rituals that happen. Utilize more of the features. 

I would rate it a six out of ten. It's a good product. I just don't know if it's valuable. It just seems like I could use it in Lucidchart or with other products in their suite to replace it.