What needs improvement with Lucidspark?

There's a bit of a learning curve. It's a little bit harder than something like Asana which I have been using for six years. However, overall I'd give it maybe a B-plus. It'll probably take me about another week or so to really get a hang of it. Due to the fact that you can't force everyone to be in the room to brainstorm, it’s made the process maybe 20% slower. I love remote work, however, remote work is also slower in a couple of ways when you're doing collaborative stuff. You're more productive remote when you're by yourself, and yet, collaboration can be a little slower. The solution doesn’t make it easier to prioritize ideas. It's more about just getting a bunch of ideas up there quickly, and then we prioritize them in Jira. There are a few too many sub-menu options under the breakout board and the team tools. While the layout looks good, there are too many options to click through. There's a little bit of latency with the collaboration bit. Overall it's not quite as fast as Google Docs, however, it's really close.

It's not intuitive. There's the learning curve. That is my barrier to using a tool like this. I come from a background where I have used mind maps extensively, however, even to replicate the usage of a mind map in Lucidspark, I have found it to be quite cumbersome. That's why I believe there is a bit of a learning curve. I'm still trying to figure out which template I should use, whether it was the right one, and things like that. While I am still exploring, the next thing I would look for is how I could integrate a Lucidspark diagram with Atlassian Confluence. I might also look at integrating Lucidspark with Microsoft Teams. I don't know if it does it already. I haven't looked yet, however, I would want to try those features out, if I continue using it.

One thing that I actually found difficult to do was to introduce video calls. Managing calls and the whiteboards and being all remote is difficult. Apart from that, it works pretty well. Sometimes the whiteboard can be distracting if someone is presenting. For example, if one person is building and wants to have the attention of others, it can become a bit hard to focus the sharing only on that specific part, or following that specific part and not having a call at the same time, which is something that actually works in-person. It's easier to focus in-person on a person just talking in front of a whiteboard and presenting whatever he's working on. Right now, we're using the web-based version. If there could be a desktop application or a specific OS application that would render faster times with lower lag, under the benefits of having a desktop application, that would probably be in our best interest. A browser is going to have its limitations in terms of how much computing power it can deliver from that standpoint. Therefore, if we could use our own machine to render our schemas, that would probably be an even faster render and offer a smoother interaction between the schema and the user. That would be something that I would like to use. At this point, from what we were using in Lucid so far, I don't actually have any suggestions in terms of extra features. I'm really happy with what I have so far, and we're probably going to have to use it a little bit more in order to dream of something better.

In terms of improvement, having layout guides would be nice. I would also like to have the ability to paginate, create a frame around some content other than a rectangle.

It doesn't respond instantly and the traces that we make are not that accurate. We have to use it in a slower way. We can't do a quick drawing because it doesn't respond accurately. The tracing is inaccurate and we have to do the drawing ourselves.

One thing that I noticed, when I was creating a document or something else, is a lot of empty space. If I am creating from a particular position, there is a lot of empty space above it. I am not sure why this happens. If there is a solution for this, then it would help.

This is a feature-rich product and I would like to see more opportunities for teaching new users how to learn and use the breadth of the platform. Ideally, it would be nice if there were a set of guidelines to explain what it is capable of. I know that there are videos online, and I've watched a few. But, I know that when I first started, just playing around, there were things I didn't discover that I could do until much later. This is why I get surprised by certain integrations I learn that they have. It would have been great to know right from the start, with a guided tutorial on how to use the various options. As it is now, we have invested internally in the educational resources needed to learn how to use it. A tool that can be very self-serving in that way, and enable its users to use it to the breadth of what it is capable of doing, is always a great thing. Whatever they can do to help make the visual look a little cleaner would be great because it can get a bit messy, or inconsistent. If there were automations to do things like making sure that elements are of the same size and correct alignment, it would help to make the visual more presentable. This is important because, at the end of what you create, it can have a very positive impact on what is ultimately shared with the client.

Initially, I was a little confused about how to get to the different projects. I would like to have a dark mode, but the option is not available. When I was making some of the charts, some anchors were a bit annoying. I had trouble keeping everything lined up where if I moved a section over to add to a chart, it became a bit more difficult to get everything back into line. I had to go through each element that I'd moved because sometimes it would end off by a few pixels, which really annoyed me.

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.

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.

Sometimes, editing text can be confusing. Changing different fonts and subtitles and the shapes that you're trying to use can be confusing. There isn't that much that I would improve other than just nitpicky user differences.

I would like for the whiteboard to have the ability to be expanded. It doesn't have the ability to be a continuous page so that you don't have to erase things. This would help when I'm teaching concepts and move on to something else if I want to go back to what I had shown earlier. It would help me to have a way to reach that.

Some parts where the arrows flow tend to flow in a strange direction where you want to drag it to, and it requires a lot of adjusting here and there. It's just the flow of the arrow sometimes gets a little tricky, and then when you move something else, it gets wonky, and then you have to go back and fix it up. That's the only thing that needs improvement.

There is room for improvement with the user interface. It almost feels "uncooked." It sometimes feels like a prototype rather than the real thing.

They have a nice color palette and the color palette is intuitive. What I mean by intuitive is that the colors chosen work really well with the text. If you put text over an object with color behind it, then the text is very visible. So that's very nice. But we worked with the owner of the company to make presentations and she wanted colors that did not make sense but we went ahead and used those anyway. It might be nice to have just a few more default colors set up even if they were the colors that you would have to reverse the text out. Maybe if they were dark and you'd have to use white text on them. It would be nice to have some of those because everything that we started out with, the boss said, "All of those are pastel colors. So I don't like those. We need something bolder and brighter." That's what we had to go find. If there were some default colors that were bolder and brighter, even though they don't work with texts so well, then we could reverse out the text and make it whiter or something like that. They have a grid system for snapping too, and they've done a lot to try to line things up so that the lines don't squiggle when you draw a line between one item and another. Everything has to be lined up. Everything has to be 90 degrees exact. But a lot of other people on the team just throw something together really quickly and the lines are not straight. And so it would be nice to have some feature that eliminates that problem. I write software, so I know that's probably a very complex issue and they look like they spent a lot of time working on it that still doesn't quite work. That's the only thing that I can think of that might make it better.

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.

Depending on how much Lucidspark wants to emulate a true whiteboard experience, there could be other ways to do things. For instance, we have to create the container when we do it. In a typical sort of whiteboard situation, it could be helpful if there were templated containers, like a parking lot, where someone could just click, then it would show up. Most people with a whiteboard process have something like this, but we do it ourselves. However, this is not something that would keep me from choosing the product. I would like an integration where if I am looking at a chart and immediately recognize that there needs to be a meeting to discuss something, then there should be a way to just click something and say, "Under team tools set up a meeting based on this chart," and it puts a link to the charts that I am reviewing. Then, it integrates with Outlook (or whatever mail service) and sends it to the appropriate people. The less clicks, the better; if it takes me one click to do that, then I won't forget. I won't have to write it down someplace. It will just be done.

One thing I wish it had is, if I draw a square or a rectangle freehand, that it would actually just draw a nice rectangle; or similarly with a circle. Some sort of automatic shape recognition and formatting would be helpful. I also wish I had a pen and tablet so I could draw better. I have a hard time drawing freehand with my mouse.

One of the things that I had trouble with, and it may be due to the fact that we're a Microsoft Teams environment, and it may be that I just have not been able to get the permissions to integrate my versions of the apps with Lucidspark because of the security measures, but I have not been as successful in integrating my desktop apps with Lucidspark and Lucidchart, which is something I would like to be able to do better. There is an emphasis on Google as a set of cloud apps and cloud storage but I don't use Google so that doesn't really help. We're a Microsoft shop so we've got a lot of OneDrive. We have been using Box, which I don't like and which we're moving away from, but my legacy storage asset was Dropbox. Some flexibility there would be worthwhile. I was looking at the Kanban Board template and it's great. You bring it in, the grid is set up, and then you can add sticky notes. I would like to be able to lock the structure in place so that I could just move sticky notes. Maybe that's just something that I haven't figured out yet, but that would be amazing.

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.

The only thing that is a little cumbersome for me is trying to use a mouse as a stylist somehow. I would like it if there was a different way to do that.

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.

One thing about the template library is that it does seem too focused on folks who develop SaaS products. There might be an opportunity for a little bit of an expansion for other, virtual, business-meeting-facilitation use cases, for folks who are not in the product development space. In terms of its user interface and intuitiveness, it took a little bit of time to figure out the difference between the selection tool and the move-around tool. When I was able to figure out a few keyboard shortcuts, that helped a whole lot. Having those keyboard shortcuts a little more apparent or visible, in the early setup, as a new user is getting used to the platform, could help. The one other significant recommendation is because I do work with folks outside of my organization quite regularly. The user experience of having them all have to set up a free account to join me in a workspace is a bit cumbersome. I really would love it if there was a Visitor link that would allow contributors who don't have free logins to join and participate.

There might be a way to do this in Lucidspark, but if there were a way to leave comments for internal collaborators, that would be good. Let's say we were brainstorming something. It would be helpful to have comments that we could see, but if we were to share a view with someone else, they wouldn't see those behind-the-scenes comments. Also, it would be nice if they had something that I could share with co-workers, maybe a quick five-minute or something that shows, "Hey, this is the utility. You guys can do this."

There are some things which are kind of complicated to know how to use. I would have to get used to them a bit more, or learn how to use them more, because I feel like there are a lot of features and I don't really know about all of them. I would need more tutorials, and that's one of the biggest things. It's so nice when you're able to just hop onto a program and intuitively know how to use it. Also, it is so tedious to have to teach new team members how to use the program, especially if they don't collaborate consistently but are hopping on for one meeting. The easier that they could make it for people to learn, like improving the learning curve, the better that Lucidspark could be. What drew me to Lucidspark was that I hopped on and it was easy and intuitive. It was very nice to look at and use. That caught me. However, there are advanced features that I would have to learn how to use, and if I want my other team members to use them, then I would have to be able to quickly and easily explain them. So, if they could make pop-up tutorials for new team collaborators, e.g., click here to do this and that as a very brief intro tutorial, then that would be helpful. I don't know if they have that already, but that would be helpful for collaborators. There are still some things that are a little confusing or too advanced, which is why it's not easy to use and hop on. There could be some other features that could be added, like other templates. What I really liked was how there were templates that gave you examples of how you could use Lucidspark. I feel like that is helpful for people to see. Adding more variety would be helpful for people. The easier it is to use, the faster someone can just pick it up and start using it. I feel like that will improve the platform and get more people to join it. A lot of small organizations need these sorts of tools, but they don't have time to spend learning about what is good about this solution and how it can help them. I would recommend making it as easy as possible, especially for small organizations.