Ceros

Many of my interactive designs have complicated carousels, click-to-reveals, navigation, menus, etc. Some of these things can really give you grey hairs at a young age, but Ceros makes detailed interactions easy to build out. The tools are laid out easily so that you know what each button is going to do and how it's going to interact with other objects on your canvas. It can be tedious, but it beats having to learn coding and deal with the HTML myself. A few other honorable mentions: Ceros has an excellent array of templates that users can take and build onto; Ceros also is very receptive to feedback from users, and I've found in my 3+ years using the platform that a lot of idea I've added to the suggestion box have been implemented.

The lack of functionality for quizzes and assessments is a bummer. To define what I mean by quizzes, I'm strictly talking about assets where you're posed with a question, you select an answer (possibly multiple choice) and the end result after a handful of questions is to be dumped into a specific bucket category. I've talked to many Ceros reps about making quizzes, and while it's doable, it's extremely convoluted and the output of metrics is unorganized. With that said, the analytics you receive from any experience isn't really all that much to brag about. The Ceros platform has a really nice display of visuals for users to see, but once it's time to pass the data onto a client or anyone outside of the Ceros platform, you get this extremely messy and hard-to-read CSV file. I don't love that. It would be better if you could export the graphs and data visuals straight from the backend of Ceros.

Overall I'm very happy working with this software - once you get to know it and have a better understanding of the tools and how they can help you, it's pretty simple to create great animated content whether it's a landing page, quiz or a article embedded graph. You can make it as simple or complex as you want and additionally you can embed other code (like JS or forms) to add features that might not exist within Ceros. Ceros has a lot of various standard JS type animations which can transform a page into something that is fun or exciting to scroll through. I'm very impressed with the Inspire gallery showing so many different applications and fun projects using the software and it gives us ideas to use in next project.

While there are not a lot of things I am not happy with, I do wish there were more shape features and line options ( octagon, maybe a free form shape, dotted or double line - sort of like Photoshop ). I also would like to see a masking tool. There are occasional bugs.

As an Adobe based designer, the Ceros platform is easy to create a layout with previous Adobe InDesign experience. Ceros Inspire is an amazing tool for quick layout templates to get your ideas following and also features some custom created sites for inspiration. The animation is easy to add and elevate any layout as someone who hasn't worked much with After Effects or other timeline animation tools.

The functionality could use some work. Features like paragraph and character styles are missing in the capabilities. The latest major update added some capabilities like "adaptive" layouts, meaning not quite responsive, but better than nothing mobile layout conversion from desktop designs. The platform isn't great for customizing SEO or social sharing.