GoVisually

Our marketing design team produces a lot of collateral, most of which are exported in PDF format. GoVisually was the best and one of the only tools of its kind that both supports PDFs and allows you to annotate them (Wake allows PDF uploads which can be commented on, but doesn't support annotations).

The annotation tool set is simple, but it includes everything that most users will need, and our broader marketing and sales team was able to use it day one with few hiccups.

As great as the PDF support is, it comes with a cost. When PDFs are uploaded they're rendered as images. This is fine in my cases, but our content team has expressed their annoyance at being able to use the browser's find text feature (ctrl + F) to location specific text in a layout. It would be great if GoVisually rendered PDFs without the conversion to images.

The other issues we've had are due to organization, but the developers have stated that they're working on one of them. The first is project organization. Currently, projects of simply displayed in a single list and there's no way to sort or group them into sections. We have 100+ projects easily, and it's struggle to find the right project at times (we don't want to lose the information from old projects and there's no archive and retrieve system that would reduce this burden). Adding a search function would make things a tad easier, but it's not available yet. GoVisually has stated that they're working on an organization system for projects and I'll be excited to see that.

I don't know if the developers have one available, but a public roadmap for the tool would be great so users can see the features they're working on. Trello does a fantastic job of this, and even use Trello boards to collect user feature requests.

Quick link function is useful. Basic uploading is useful. Adding new viewers is easy.

The login is unnecessary. I wish we could turn that function off. Getting back to the place where you can see all of the proofs is unclear to our clients. They also can't find their other versions on mobile. It's difficult to see older versions. If a client approved an older version, it shows up as approval on everything uploaded before and after that.

Before GoVisually, I was getting reviews from everywhere: paper printouts, emails, verbal walk-ups to my desk. Projects were getting stalled because requests for review got buried in email and under piles of papers on desks. It was hard to know how to prioritize edits from different managers, and often edits would be doubled up or would contradict each other.

GoVisually streamlined the review process so I don't miss edits, I don't needlessly print out projects anymore, and my users can collaborate and corroborate their edits. Projects get finished faster. Versions are easily sorted so I know people are seeing the latest version.

My complaints are mostly feature related.

My biggest issue is that you can't archive projects. This seems like a big miss.

My second biggest issue is that there's no way to control or customize email notifications. It's still slightly unclear to me how my users receive emails. Since this tool is meant to streamline communication, I think there should be a way to dictate how those notification emails go out, and at what stage in the review process.

The interface is clunky for some of my users. I think the two panel menu on the right side to access comments and old revisions is a bit cumbersome. On bigger files, sometimes you can't zoom out wide enough to see the whole file.

Go-visually works very quickly and fast. We find a lot of proofing softwares are quite slow when uploading and navigating but Go Visually is quick! The UX is nice and simple. It doesn't take long for new staff or clients to use it at all and it is very effective for communicating changes to new and existing web designs. The sharing options are nice but the sharing links are too long - bring back the short link. All in all, it suits us very nicely for our needs.

No ability to create folders for projects, so you have to create new proof's as stand alone and without folders which is not very nice for organisation. I am told the folder feature is coming soon but we are still waiting for that.