Lucidspark Reviews

I'm an Agile coach, so I use Lucidspark to facilitate retrospectives and user-story workshops.

We're using the latest web version.

As an Agile coach, where I'm currently working, Lucidspark enables me to create a kind of a forum to collaborate. Whether it's with games, whether it's with discussion, whether it's brainstorming, having a tool like Lucidspark has definitely helped us to be more organized in the way we facilitate meetings. Having something that we can present to people and get them to engage with has been very valuable.

I'm also able to use the solution to prioritize ideas. We use Lucidspark for story-boarding and story planning. When I'm facilitating meetings, I get the product owners to talk about features that they want to develop and then put them on the board. Then, I assist the process of discussions where they prioritize the items that they wrote in their sticky notes. As a result, we're able to collaboratively see the prioritization of the work items. We then end up exporting what we've discussed in these meetings to the tool that we use for product development, Jira, and take it from there.

And it allows us to sort ideas, especially when I do retrospectives with my teams. I'm able to ask questions about things that went well and what didn't go well, based on what people put up on the board. I'm able to categorize them and talk about them, and that really does save us time in our meetings. That's especially true in collaboration, with everybody looking at the board and seeing what I'm talking about or what somebody else is talking about. It does save us time rather than getting people to just talk.

In terms of the productivity of our brainstorming sessions, it has probably made us 80 percent more efficient. With things like story-writing sessions, rather than getting people to talk about the user stories they want to work on, or having them go off to Google Sheets, having everybody work together to put their ideas out there and then sort and prioritize those ideas, definitely saves us time, compared to copying and pasting things from Excel documents onto very flat document structures.

The sticky notes are the most valuable feature we use in Lucidspark. In a lot of the meetings that we conduct, we want people to be able to express themselves. They can grab sticky notes to write down an idea they're thinking about. Using the sticky notes, we can talk through each of the notes that my teams use, or we can sort them based on the kind of feedback we're getting from the questions we throw at them.

The solution’s virtual whiteboard for brainstorming is great. It feels like I have an endless board where I can zoom out and draw everybody to what I'm looking at. It's invaluable, especially right now when most people work remotely.

I have also integrated Lucidspark with Microsoft Teams, so that it is connected to my team's daily stand-ups. While people are talking, or they have ideas, or they need to have a discussion after the meeting, they can just grab a sticky note and place it there. That's something that is publicly available for everybody else on the team. This is an important capability.

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

I have been using Lucidspark for about a month now. I started this job recently and, so far, this is what we've been using. The company itself has been using it for a few months. All our users are scrum masters and Agile coaches.

I haven't experienced any outages or latency problems with Lucidspark.

It scales well. I have not had any problems with scalability. We've had sessions where there have been 50 people participating and I haven't been aware of any problems. In our company, it's the product development team that uses the solution and that's about 100 people.

We are using about 30 to 40 percent of what Lucidspark offers and those features work best for what we use it for. There are other features of Lucidspark that we probably don't require. We don't have plans to expand usage at the moment.

We have not had to call Lucidspark's tech support.

I had always been a Mural person until I started working with this company. In terms of the user interface, Lucidspark feels very basic compared to Mural. The Mural interface seems a little more straightforward. Lucidspark is a little bit intuitive, but that aspect could be better. There have been situations where I was trying to look for a timer, for instance, and I didn't find it right on time. Also, when someone shares something with me or I need to look through one of the boards I created, finding it doesn't feel as intuitive as I would like.

Also, I wish Lucidspark had an iPad app. Maybe it has one but I'm not aware of it. I have to use a computer, and that is not as intuitive compared to when I was using Mural.

Overall, Lucidspark is a very simple, straightforward application. Anybody will pick it up almost immediately. 

The only tip I have is that if you're going to create a line with the arrow, you just have to select "none" for the arrow points. The line and arrow tools are the same thing. That's something that is not very obvious.

In-person meetings will always trump virtual. People like a lot of engagement, even in-person. People are more engaged when you actually see them face to face. You put out a whiteboard and marker, et cetera. With virtual, it's a little challenging because, first of all, you have to walk people who are not as technically inclined through the tool itself, and sometimes on short notice. If I have a workshop that I want to create, I first have to introduce everybody to the tool, because they don't have the time to go through the tool themselves. Remote meetings pose their own challenges.

I have a startup. Other members of the leadership team are located across the country in two other places. We do ideation using Lucidspark to have a central repository for our notes, so we have a place to come back and take a look as we move on.

We are a startup. The main thing that we used it for was to develop our go-to-market plan. We used it to talk about and draw our specific customer segment applications, business models, etc. We also used a very low level timeline feature based on where the boxes are held on the chart. We finalized that in Lucidchart and used Lucidspark for go-to-market strategy planning.

Lucidspark makes it easy for all of us to see the same thing at the same time in real-time. It is very easy to move something to the side, then everybody can see it and agree upon it, saying, "Okay, we are not going to deal with this right now." We sort of use containers, putting it in a parking lot for now, then move other things to what we are going to deal with now.

It allows anybody who is active in it to make whatever changes they need to make right then. It doesn't fall on the shoulders of the person who is "taking notes". So, the conversation is able to proceed while people are moving things with containers, adding notes, etc. Everybody can do this at the same time.

Lucidspark has probably changed the way that we conduct meetings. Previously, there were a lot of documents being sent, people having to review them, and sending them back and forth. With Lucidspark, we have been able to just have a very simple outline or a few containers setup in a location, and people know where that location is. When it's time for the meeting, we can just jump into it with the same level of understanding, then proceed to have a conversation with everybody, who have the same knowledge and understanding immediately.

It is pretty easy to move our ideas from the idea stage to execution, using the vendor’s suite of products. Right now, we use Lucidspark. We keep things in it for a while. As those things sort of solidify, they are moved into Lucidchart when it becomes more of a process and less of an ideation or high level idea. We then use Lucidchart for as long as possible. For now, because we are just a startup, there is not much that needs to happen after Lucidchart because we are still developing high-level processes, etc. It works very well for us because there are really just a few steps: a brainstorm of the thought, then putting it into Lucidspark, and ultimately moving that into Lucidchart. 

The most valuable feature is the real-time aspect, being able to know when a particular person is collaborating. It has colors and associations within it, which make it easily visible. So, if I go to something that we created, I can very quickly tell when and who made changes or added notes, at a quick glance. That has probably been the biggest help so far.

The solution’s user interface and intuitiveness are great. I signed in and didn't need to use any tools. I didn't have any questions. Understanding-wise, the interface has the same feel as Google Docs; it is very easy to move in.

Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts is my favorite part. I was excited when I found out the solution would have this capability. Our company tried other sorts of things to create a similar sort of tool, so it is good that this is within Lucid. You can kind of flip back and forth with the charts that are already created if you have a Lucid account, which we do. Therefore, it is good that it is all held in the same place and things can be transferred, if needed. It has worked out really well for us.

The solution’s Collaborator Colors feature makes it very easy to quickly look to see when and who has made changes since the last time the whiteboard has been updated. The feature is very helpful. This is one of the most important features because of its ease of use. If your team has had a meeting and you have a mental image of what the whiteboard looked like before, and you come back and someone has gone to it in the interim, then you can very quickly identify what has changed and who has made the change. If there are things that need to happen based upon that, it's a very short jump, as opposed to needing separate notes. It is intuitive, making it a lot easier.

I like the Sticky Notes and texts.

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.

I have been using it for about two months.

I haven't had any trouble. It works the way it should, and it is up when I need it to be up.

We haven't been in a place where we needed to scale. From previous uses of Lucidchart, not Lucidspark, it was easily scalable.

We are really small. For now, I manage the unified administrator console and that is easy to do. As we expand, I can see that it still seems pretty user-friendly and easy to manage. At previous companies, most of the project managers and product developers had access to Lucid. I could see for us moving forward we could have a similar strategy, where people would have access to these tools and that would be important.

Right now, there are just three of us using it. I am the CEO, then the other two are consultants/technical advisors.

As our company matures, I have had good experiences with Lucid at previous companies. As our company grows, it would be one of the baseline software applications that new hires would receive. It just makes day-to-day work, and the transferring of that work across departments and functions, just so much easier. So, as we grow, people will get it.

I have never had any issues where I have needed to use it.

I have used Visio and all kinds of Google Docs. In my experience with Lucidchart and Lucidspark, they make the process painless. It makes it easy for people to become a part of it so there is not a lot of upfront work that needs to be done, instead of making it difficult for people to join into conversations. People can immediately help and are instantly recognizable. It's just seamless moving things through Lucidchart and Lucidspark, even exporting things for people that don't necessarily have it into a PDF. It is very user-friendly and seamless, so we don't have to worry so much about the formatting of things. We can focus more on the actual action of creating.

Box had similar capabilities, at least in the way that we used it. It had a shared document and people could all be a part of the document, but it was very rudimentary, where everybody was able to see a document being edited. It had its own issues with that, but we also used Box.

The initial setup was very easy. I got an email, then 10 or 15 minutes later, the entire team was set up and ready to use it.

The time is no longer spent trying to get everybody to be in one document or sending documents back and forth so that everybody is on the same page. Those things add up, especially as a team gets larger. Also, there are errors that come with that, e.g., sending the wrong version of a document. If the document is held somewhere, then it is easy to determine who made the last correction. Everybody is a part of the team so I can remove people as an administrator who need to be removed or add them to a specific thing. It is very straightforward and worth it in that manner.

It is not cost-prohibitive. It is well worth it, but we are also a small team. We are definitely planning on having it as part of our onboarding for everyone, but I haven't looked at the pricing for an enterprise level or large set of employees. For right now, it's worth the cost and there are no issues with it, but I'm not sure what that would look like with scaling.

I used Lucidchart previously, which is why I believe that I was invited to use Lucidspark.

Every solution has their own framework. We have used all sorts of collaboration/project management software: Visio, Asana, Lucid, and Google Docs. Because I worked in IT, we tested them out. We picked Lucid because of its ease of use and breadth of capability.

Visio is the old standard for people, and it will do a certain thing. However, sometimes it is not the most user-friendly, and there are sort of capabilities that it doesn't have. Google Docs is sort of on the other end of that, where it has this sort of pervasiveness where everybody uses Google Docs, but it is not as user-friendly in getting people to share documents or being part of a document with shared across a team, seeing that in real-time, and having all of those markers. There is a lot more upfront work that needs to happen, as opposed to Lucid where I just send out the emails. People are a part of it, either the team or page. It is very, very simple and straightforward. 

The biggest lesson is that it doesn't have to be difficult. Part of this is a mid-COVID situation, where having remote or virtual conversations can be just as effective as having in-person conversations, if you have the tools which support that. I know that Lucidspark has definitely supported this. My team has never been in the same location, but we have been able to move our process forward with this tool and other tools, just based on its capabilities. So, it has worked well for us.

The first time that we used it, because it was a new tool, the engagement wasn't high. After that, people (other than myself) who hadn't used it before saw its capabilities, then it was used more often.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

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.

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.

I'm using it for two purposes. One is internal brainstorming with team members inside of my own organization, and the other is external facilitation, in a consulting capacity, with our clients.

Just yesterday I led a session with some existing team members and some new team members, an onboarding session, to talk about what attributes make for a good client. It was really easy to have team members with more experience contribute more, and have team members with less experience see and learn from those contributions. And when it came to the distillation and sorting and aggregation of those ideas, everyone was able to contribute to those bigger-picture things.

Lucidspark definitely enables you to prioritize ideas and that is extremely important. The prioritization of ideas is one of the most important pieces of decision-making, and decision-making is a central function of any business. If you can't make decisions, you can't move projects forward. We're all trying to figure out how we make those decisions in a virtual space, without sharing an office together. This is a tool that has helped us do that.

It also enables you to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. I had no idea it was important to me until I knew that it was possible. Now that I know that it's possible, it has a lot of value. Any opportunity to get to the most important pieces and parts, such as what is the hardest question and what is the most challenging next obstacle—the sooner you can elevate them—the easier it is to get to the hard conversation.

Overall, Lucidspark is a vast improvement when it comes to the productivity of working and brainstorming sessions. Where we may have previously had folks respond to a static survey, with open-ended responses, it can now be a dynamic, crowd-sourced session with real-time contributions and improvements that may have otherwise never appeared. Or, if they did appear, they would have been in a follow-up meeting after a whole bunch of synthesis of those old survey results.

We also use Lucidchart and that was actually how I became aware of Lucidspark. The overall suite, for helping to visualize each step of the process, from brainstorming initial ideas, to turning those ideas into reality, is very good. I have used a lot of different chart-building tools in the past, in many different forms, but there are a lot of intuitive features in Lucidchart, inclusive of their templates. Those features make standard business process design and modification really easy, and really easy to convey to others who do not contribute to the creation of those documents. The ability to take a chart made with Lucidchart and use it in a Lucidspark environment is a really great opportunity to take what used to be one person writing down and designing a process, and turn it into allowing more people to contribute.

I have really enjoyed Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard. It is a big step up from some of the other tools that I have used. Not to be judgemental, but the Google Suite has a product called Jamboard and that is what we used previously. They are very different in their capabilities. I appreciate the robustness of Lucidspark quite a bit. It adds a lot more functionality when it comes to multiple participants, and I really appreciate that it is an expanding canvas. The limited size and shape of something like a Jamboard is not conducive to new ideas expanding, going further. I really like a lot of those features in the design. 

I certainly have made a lot of use of the template library as well.

I also really enjoy the emoji reaction voting. That is a fun gamification of a pretty common feature for facilitation. 

And the sorting and aggregating by color, or grouping, or contributor, are all also really helpful features. While the Collaborator Colors is a really nice feature to have, I could imagine a way to still use the tool without it.

Absolutely all of the work I've done with Lucidspark has been done when I've been in a different location than the other contributors. It meets the different needs of contributors, who may be less comfortable in an in-person environment, to be at a place where they have more ability to contribute, and I really appreciate that. It's not reliant on somebody speaking up because there are so many ways to contribute, without having to come off of mute on a Zoom call and say something out loud. Not everybody likes that version of contributing. It might make them feel anxious. The ability to just be able to type, or respond, or help with consolidating ideas into groups—any of those things are really easy for anyone in a session to do and to support. I've loved that.

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.

I've been using Lucidspark for just over a month.

I have had no outages, no glitches, or anything that would make me think that something in the solution is unstable.

I would rate its scalability as very strong. I appreciated that when I dropped a link in Slack, it said, "Hey, we think this is a Lucidspark link. Do you want to download the Slack plugin?" I thought that was intuitive and helpful, given that we do so much of our day-to-day work in Slack already. If it talks to Slack nicely, that's a heck of an upgrade.

I have not used technical support for Lucidspark.

We selected Lucidspark because the existing work that we've done in Lucidchart is a huge component. We have a bunch of process and workflow documents that exist there, and team members who already have Lucidchart logins. Adding an additional license to access Lucidspark on top of that was really seamless and easy, once I found the button to start a Lucidspark session. That existing product that we already had was a huge foot in the door.

The distinction between what components were in Lucidspark, such as the virtual white boarding component, and which ones were in Lucidchart, was a little tricky at the onset. Finding that it was truly in the "setup new template," and that that additional link was present, took me longer to find that I expected it to.

I've certainly received a good number of marketing materials and communications that are branded from Lucidspark. While the branding and the coloring allowed me to pretty clearly connect the dots that these two things were associated, when I clicked through on the link, the acknowledgement of what we currently had versus what we could have if we upgraded or added Lucidspark, was more confusing than I had anticipated. The way I overcame that was just a bunch of button-clicking and finding the dropdown that allowed me to start a Lucidspark canvas. Once I did, I said to myself, "Oh, it's here," and I could show my team exactly where it was. But prior to that, I was asking myself, "How do I get from this logo that says 'Lucidspark' and that is clickable, to doing something in Lucidspark?" because it always brought me to up my Lucidchart interface. I didn't know how to get around that.

Overall, the Lucidspark deployment took almost no time at all, except for that little kerfuffle of trying to figure out how to get to it.

I've shared it in our organization and folks have free logins, right now, to act as contributors. We have not done a full company deployment with paid user profiles for all members. I work on our client success team and that team has just over 10 people. In addition to them, I have shared it with our chief creative officer and one of our senior product designers and they are starting to work with the tool in their product teams.

We have absolutely seen return on investment from using Lucidspark because of the time savings.

It's a very reasonable $8 a month. That makes it really accessible and helps it fill a pretty significant need for virtual collaboration. Just about every leadership team member that I've talked to said, “Oh, well, that's cheap, just go buy it."

I've used the embedded white boarding feature in both Microsoft Teams and in Zoom. They're rudimentary, but certainly better than nothing. The other product that I have spent the most time in is MURAL.

The connection between existing documents in Lucidchart and Lucidspark is a huge value-add, and I like that that ecosystem allows you to benefit from previous work inside of that suite. That's a great value.

MURAL's biggest thing—and it's actually where I had the inspiration for the recommendation for how Lucidspark could be improved—is that it does have a Visitor link. While working with clients, you don't need them to set up a free account to participate. That's a big thing. I could see a world where we continue to use Lucidspark internally, because it's really easy to have your employees set up logins and pay attention to them, and do client-facing work in MURAL because it's less cumbersome for the client. The teams overlap little enough that it would be very possible for them to do their specific work in each of those different silos. However, it would be another silo and it would be lovely if we did all of it in the same place.

In functionality, MURAL is very similar to Lucidspark. The templates that are available in MURAL are a little more advanced, and they cover a broader cross section of use cases.

My internal resource sharing across our teams was a little silly and delayed. When I saw this solution I said to myself, “Oh, this might be helpful," and that was probably a backward way to go about it. It may make more sense for people to think about all of the possible use cases in their organization, or at least multiple use cases in their organization. I really did come to Lucidspark thinking about just the chair that I sit in, but it has a lot of applications outside of my own role. Ensuring that folks know about it and can benefit from it can take the productivity that you might get from one team doing this kind of collaboration, and spread it to a broader cross section of teams.

The solution has features to tag and automatically group and organize ideas after a brainstorming session, but I need to spend a little bit more time with them. We've primarily done manual sorting at this point. Part of that is a holdover from in-person facilitation. The sorting and aggregating component when you're in an actual conference room is just a part of the process, because there isn't a way to do that with sticky notes. I still rely on that a little bit as a facilitation point, and it means that I've just not leaned on the tools that are built-in, as much.

But the feature that I like the most in that context is the ability for individual contributors to link associated ideas when somebody else may have had a similar recommendation or suggestion. Having those little legacy trails, where two sticky notes have a line connecting them, is something that you just couldn't do in a physical space without tangling the entire conference room in yarn. This ability to automatically group ideas speeds up the ability to take action, a little bit, and I'm still getting used to whether our team is ready for, and desirous of, that speed. The main focus has not been the speed at which we can execute. It's been the consensus-building along the way. But overall, it does help. Using the tool to group and bundle ideas takes about half the time that it used to take.

Using the Lucidchart suite of products, I actually think of things such as moving ideas from the idea stage to execution as still occurring in other spaces, from an execution standpoint. We leave the sessions in Lucidchart and we're still going to databases and to our product. The groundwork and the alignment and expectation-setting and direction, from the work that's done in Lucidchart and Lucidspark, are incredibly valuable to ensuring the ability to do those other things, but I still do think of those other things as happening outside of the Lucidchart suite.

I really have enjoyed the product. It is filling a valuable gap in the market as we all transition, still nine months later in most places, to remote work. I am happy to have it.

It started out to build flowcharts for organizational structures. It has evolved into more of a project management tool, outlining systems and opportunity flows from the inside of our business. We use these visuals that we create to speak with our software implementation partner so they can build the structure that we need for our systems.

I am the one on my team who uses it 90 percent of the time, as far as creating documents.

The benefit has been that it is a new tool and something else which helps engage my team. 

Another benefit is the ease at which you can create whiteboard pieces to brainstorm together. It's like me writing on a whiteboard, but not asking for collaboration from others when writing on the whiteboard.

Lucidspark has enabled us to prioritize ideas. During a brainstorming session about a launch of a new product, we were able to put all the ideas and color code them in post-it notes. We then categorize them by groups and priorities, respectively. It was easy to move them around so everybody could see what was going on.

We asked for everybody's input on a particular project and their priorities. When we were able to visualize them on a Lucidspark whiteboard, we saw the similarities between everybody's suggestions, then we were able to move those together.

From the brainstorming session where we collected the ideas and grouped them forward, we were able to prioritize those ideas into an action, i.e., what needs to happen next on the product launch. So, it worked well for our team. This is the first time that we had used it this way.

Overall, Lucidchart and Lucidspark helped me as a visual learner to lay out my thoughts and ideas, then arrange them in a succinct manner so I could communicate them effectively to the next person.

Until recently, I was using the document piece where I can create these outlines and stuff based on their shape library. 

I don't use a whole lot of their templates, but the templates give me ideas on how to build my own structures moving forward. 

Recently, when they launched the new piece, which is more of the whiteboard design, it has become a place where we can collaborate together. Especially in these days of virtual meetings, we can show a whiteboard and move things around. I have only been able to use the whiteboard a couple times. I like the ability that it is never-ending, i.e., a very large white space that we can scroll through. It is not limited to the size of a piece of paper. 

With virtual meetings, we are always looking for ways to make sure that people are engaged in the virtual meeting. I think the whiteboard aspect of Lucidspark allows that to happen more efficiently and effectively. There is action taking place on the board, so it is not just someone presenting.

I am a visual person, which is why I like Lucidspark. Its user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good. It is pretty intuitive to understand how we are moving forward and drawing things on the whiteboard. It's very simple, not complicated. The things that I use are mainly the post-it notes and containers, where I can grab a group of post-it notes, then put them in a container and move them around.

It is very efficient to move ideas from the idea stage to execution, using the Lucidspark’s suite of products. When we are sending it to a software designer or implementation partner, I am able to create a visual flow where I might outline everything in a document. Then, I can create a visual flow in Lucidspark so they can see the progression of steps, which makes it easier for them to design because of the software. Because the software of Salesforce is using these same types of visuals when the system is created, there is a great relationship between what I am creating and what the developers are developing inside Salesforce for us.

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.

I have been using it for probably four years.

Lucidspark is very stable. I have had no crashes. I love the functionality as it moves between devices. Even with different Chrome profiles, I can easily log into my Lucidspark account from any Chrome profile or browser profile. 

I love the functionality. It's easy to use, printable, and downloadable as a PDF, if a person does not have Lucidspark or the Lucid suite. I can share those documents that way.

The functionality is there. We have not used it on a larger scale. I am the person who uses it 90 percent of the time. We share documents just for viewing, but not for collaboration. I do see how it could be used that way. You could grab a team license and easily have more than one person working on a document, but we do not use it that way.

There are probably three paid accounts on campus. There are another six or seven users who are just using the free account to view things. These are all directors, director managers, and even C-suite people.

We have not used their technical support.

Previously, I used very cumbersome tools inside Google Suite, Microsoft suite, or even some mind mapping pieces. However, there isn't a solution that really does what Lucidspark does for me.

It is very easy to set up Lucidspark. A couple of clicks, and then you can get something started. It takes minutes to set up.

The ROI is mainly personal. It is just easier for me to communicate thoughts when I can draw them out.

Using Lucidspark saved time, especially in a virtual meeting setting. We can easily collaborate, move things together, and then prioritize the groupings to get a quicker, more successful product launch.

The licensing is a fair price. We mainly have single users. We chose not to do the team user because of the cost. We didn't see a need for that at this point. We have talked to Lucidchart and Lucidspark salesmen often about that. 

We have also talked to Lucidchart people about integration with Salesforce. We thought we found a solution that would help us visualize and move some things, but it did not work for us or at the price point that we needed to pay to do it. So, we only use LucidChart inside itself with no integrations to other places.

I did not evaluate other vendors or options.

I have suggested this product to many people because of its ease of use and clarity. You can outline processes, programs, and operations moving forward. So, I have recommended it to others. I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

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.

We are using Lucidspark for brainstorms and for meetings.

We have also been using it for our action plan, to plan our strategy steps.

Lucidspark has made my organization more creative and it's easier to do creative techniques.

It enables us to prioritize ideas. It's very important that it has that ability.

It makes the overall productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions better. It increases our productivity. It saves us time and gives us more time to discuss what is more important. We find it causes there to be more engagement and this attitude also helps us be more focused.

In terms of the most valuable features, I like that we can compare a report to our templates. That is really useful. I saw that it has all of these templates that I can use. I also love that I can use my own images.

It's really easy to use and intuitive. It's very understandable, everything is easy to get.

The virtual whiteboard is excellent. It's easy to use. 

With the templates and the work that you do, you can convert it into a template and you can use it later.

I don't use the Collaborator Colors feature in Lucidspark but I have been using the same tool in Lucidchart. I suppose it's the same. We have been using it. We all see the same screen on the computer or we can project it.

It has features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session. This ability makes it easier to help find patterns and themes among the ideas. Its ability to automatically group ideas helps save time in organizing ideas rather than having to manually group and bundle ideas. It saves the two hours it takes to get all the materials that we would have to use if it was manual.

It absolutely enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It is very important because time is very valuable.

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.

I have been using Lucidspark for about a month. 

It is very stable. 

It's very scalable. The amount of users who use it depends on what we're working on. 

It doesn't require much staff for maintenance or deployment. It's very easy.

We do have plans to increase usage.

Their technical support is good. 

Positive

This is easier to use than other solutions.

The initial setup is very simple. It took a couple of minutes. We had a quick understanding of how to use it and how it could help us. It was easy to communicate to everyone about how Lucidspark could help us. It was enough to be able to use it.

I didn't use an integrator. 

There are no additional costs to standard licensing. 

I found out about Lucidspark because I was using Lucidchart.

I absolutely recommend it because it increases communication with your team.

My advice would be to just try it because it's amazing and when you start using it you'll see that it is an excellent tool.

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of ten.