As a designer, it was amazing to how badly invision was unable to move beyond their original simple prototyping platform. They were way ahead of the curve when they began and simply never did anything useful beyond that.
What was even more wild was watching them clearly dump money into gimmicks and sales over their product. I worked at a large agency during invisions heyday and they were constantly pitching all levels of employees on whatever their new thing was, typically with sales people flying out for in person visits, buying whole office lunches, etc. I prob sat through a dozen pitches in a year where literally nothing about their product fundamentally improved or changed. People who had no idea what a design system was would pitch a half baked "design system manager" or similar, but were unable to really talk to any depth about design systems or answer questions about gaps in their product. It was very clear they would not succeed.
Invision actually tried building its own Sketch clone! It's hard to find much about it today, but Invision Studio was an attempt to move up the value chain and build the design app that feeds the Invision prototyping experience. It was extremely ambitious, and it fell absolutely flat.
Invision Studio came on the scene just as Figma was starting to eat Sketch's lunch, and lacking both Sketch's feature set and Figma's speed, it simply got caught in the crossfire. It must have been incredibly expensive to build, and its failure probably played a big part in locking Invision into its current path to eventually shutting down.
Invision Studio was competing against Sketch, Adobe XD, Gravit Designer and Lunacy all at the same time. Invision Studio didn't really differentiate itself and it was super crash prone to boot. Then Figma came and ate everyone's lunch.
Invision clearly didn't have the ambition or understanding of user needs as they simply kept copying others instead of innovating in the space. Invision had a big headstart on others but still fell flat.
A while ago (around 2014-2017), I used InVision plus Sketch daily and tried the InVision Studio beta.
Their prototyping product was limited and full of bugs, and in many senses, it was a regression compared to older prototyping tools. Based on that experience, I was highly skeptical about the ability to deliver for InVision Studio. The Studio beta was extremely slow and unstable. It was dead even before the rise of Figma.
The thing is Macaw was pretty amazing when it came out, but relaunching the same app (3?) years later, with a worse UI, and bad / forced integrations into the rest of the Invision stack – not good.
Framer was also in a similar situation, but they successfully pivoted into being a website builder, competing with Webflow now but in a much nicer interface, as well as inputting and outputting React code.
We will always be beholden to Sketch for finally killing off Photoshop as a primary app UI tool. Dear god I’m so glad the days of Layer Comps are behind us.
Sketch is Mac-only, its interactive prototype mode was clunky and you couldn't even check it on mobile without a "Sketch Mirror" iOS app. This was a software by MacOS designers for MacOS designers.
yeah, but the point stands. that’s how Adobe took over the world, as well as Apple products like the iPad, the iPhone, etc. “by Mac users for Mac users” is historically a very strong opening position.
Not anymore, most work software is web-based and collaborative/multi-user by default. Sketch didn't do that and was quickly overshadowed by Figma. I doubt future software in this area will be desktop app-based.
I think things evolve in a spiral, where old ideas are recycled with a twist that makes them more appealing.
The tools before the mobile era, the canceled Adobe Thermo (aka Flash Catalyst), Microsoft Expression Blend, and recently Framer (which now is a website creation tool like Webflow), tried to fill the gap between design, prototyping, and implementation. But, they failed because web frameworks move fast, and nobody wants a vendor lock-in of unmaintainable code.
Maybe the Figma killer finally finds a way to solve it in a way that makes designers and developers happy.
I think (or hope) it's some combination between using real code (such as Storybook) in combination with a GUI. This has the following benefits:
- There is only source of truth and it's the code
- People who can't code (most designers) can still build prototypes with available components
- No (manual) synchronization between code a drawing tool (Figma, Penpot) needed
At the moment it looks like UXPin is going in this direction.
Yep, I agree. And I agree that designers can't "code", but to be more specific, it's more that they shouldn't be implementing functionality. So if a designer is designing a calculator, and the calculator returns 1+1=3, then the designer is not liable for fixing it.
On the other hand, if by "writing code" we mean the literal act of writing something that both a human and a computer can understand, then that's a different question. Designers need to express nuance, and GUI tools are limited in their ability to handle complexity. There's a reason visual programming tools haven't overtaken code.
What I'm getting at is that there very well could be a "language" specifically tailored for UI/UX designers, that allows them to specify their design decisions for the presentational layer of the application. If you had such a language, you could create a toolchain on top of it, which produces real code for developers to consume however they wish.
Never understood what the appeal of Invision was. It was clunky. It wasn't a proper prototyping tool, just a gloried image hot-mapping tool.
And design to developer handover didn't exist either when I last had to use Invision.
For rich design prototyping nothing beats Axure or Just In Mind. Figma isn't there yet when it comes to rich prototyping. It's sufficient for simple ones.
Figma doesn't produce proper HTML based prototypes like Axure or Just In Mind and good luck prototyping heavy grid and form based apps with it. Also not great for user testing where internet connection is not reliable. Axure / Just In Mind let you export your prototypes as static HTML files, so you can use them offline. Not just useful for testing, but also sales demos where internet connection is unreliable, e.g. company booth at conferences, events etc.
Framer was even better for prototyping, but they pivoted to being a website creation tool, which was a smart move actually.
I completely agree with the above poster that Invision was trash at any real prototyping. When it came out, Axure and Justinmind had already had sophisticated control flow logic. It did have a sleeker commenting system and most people I knew were too lazy to make more robust prototypes.
I did a lot of design-to-developer handoff with InVision back in the day. It was great, perhaps you missed it.
Before Figma multiplayer, it was a great way to formalize the handoff, starting from Sketch, structuring everything, selecting some boards, and then using Craft (I believe it was called) to upload things to InVision, and then have more discussion there.
The devs never saw design files, just these cleanly structured handoffs. We could have conversations over details, etc. Worked well for the teams I was on.
Now the constant sync'ing was a hassle, not as fluid as Figma but it was a lot more formalized then Figma where devs are always asking "is this ready to review". I didn't explore prototyping very much, which IMO is still a big unsolved problem for the industry.
So, from me, cheers to InVision, yes times changed, sad they couldn't be a part of it, but their product was very awesome for me back in the day. PLUS, they had such a beautiful beautiful UI for their design exploration tool, everything was lightweight and contextual, it continues to inspire me to this day.
> Unfortunately, a bulk export is not available, so you'll need to export each document one by one. Please note that our Support team will not be able to export documents on your behalf.
I know... was in the same boat not too long ago. I built a service to make parting with the platform easier (https://invisionbulkexport.com/). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
I have interviewed and hired a couple engineers from Invison over the years. Internally they saw Figma coming but they got stuck in legacy tech dept. They did the cardinal sine of trying to rewrite big parts of their tech from scratch instead of shipping quickly in the direction they needed to go. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
I remember when we managed to add InVision to the internal list of approved apps in a bank after years of struggle with CISO, and the moment it was available internally, Figma was suddenly the hot stuff, and no one wanted to stick with InVision.
This is a reassuring signal that the market sometimes is entirely rational, and that product actually is more important than marketing/sales/distribution…at least in the design tools space.
Invision focused on dumping millions into marketing and enterprise sales and growth hacks…yet had a mediocre piece of software.
Meanwhile, Figma created a better product (and I’d guess spent wayyy less on marketing for the first 5 years) and they won.
Why don't they sunset unprofitable services but keep the profitable ones? Or did figma take all their customers? (a general assembly UX short-course I took in 2017 recommended InVision as the 'go to' wire framing tool, seems like a lot changed since).
Seems extremely poor they couldn't have built a bulk export tool. The FAQ says documents have to be exported one by one.
Surely wouldn't take that long to create one and would make it a lot less painful for users who have bug archives of old stuff there they may want to keep.
Role-playing their CFO, “because if we had money for projects that don’t earn us money, we wouldn’t be closing down.”
Role-playing an enterprise customer, “we’ll pay you through the end of the year if and only if you mail us a hard drive of our content. And if not, we’ll pay you through 5PM today. Sue us if you don’t like it.”
If the company is already going under, why not do something kind before you go? Isn't preventing needless pain the right thing to do? This kind of seems like treating people badly just because one won't be around to receive any consequences.
Yup. AND exporting your data is quite cumbersome (infinite scroll, no indication of how many projects you have, etc).
To ease the pain, I worked on a service to make parting with the platform easier (https://invisionbulkexport.com/). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
InVision was great when it first came on the scene. Used it to make nice prototypes from my Photoshop mockups and it felt revolutionary at the time. Then it felt like they never innovated after the initial product and failed attempt to capture the Sketch audience.
I thought everyone just installed cracked pirate copies ("nulled", as it was called) of IPB. How are they making money? Who is paying them for their software?
Not exclusively, but they're definitely going towards that route. I'm still paying them huge amounts of money for the license to host their software on my own servers but people who do that is a shrinking population.
Running web software without updates from some unknown source doesn't sound like a very good idea. Lots of stories out there of communities using "nulled" software which got hacked because of a backdoor left in.
I agree with the general sentiment here, it was a great tool, but wasn't able to keep up. Absolute leap forward from what came before it though.
Over the years, I've noticed that less and less folks are using it so I worked on a service to make parting with the platform easier (https://invisionbulkexport.com/). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
Can't say I'm sad to see them go. They always felt like a glorified power-point deck to me, and I hated getting mockups and designs in InVision, because there was no in-built redline like Zeppelin and Figma now have, and the designers I worked with often "forgot" to add said redlines. Giving me the raw PSD/AI file was preferable
Figma. InVision was always doomed, because it suffered from the problem that Figma did everything it did, plus a lot more, and it did it all better, with no step where you had to sync between the two apps, and you could do it with real-time collaboration, and...
They are not. If I was interviewing somewhere (I work as a UX designer) and they were still on Sketch, that be a pretty big red flag for me. Using Sketch today would be like using Illustrator during the Sketch era.
Until fairly recently, Figma was stuck in sRGB, while Sketch supported wide-gamut color. It blew my mind that designers were ok with this.
Anyway, if I were interviewing a designer, I’d look at their portfolio and just ask if they’re comfortable using whatever tool is standard at the company.
About three years ago I joined a company that was on Sketch after working at a Figma company. I thought I was pretty tool agnostic but after starting work, I quickly realized how awful the Sketch workflow is.
It's awful collaborating and sharing files with Abstract. More and more plugins were unmaintained. And with the growth of WebGL, Figma was actually far speedier than Sketch. Sure if you're 1-2 person shop or a really big company with lots of specialized Sketch plugins, Sketch might be fine but on any other team are better off making the switch.
It's funny, I also consider it a red flag if they're still using Sketch. However, personally, I still want Sketch to succeed and return to being a viable option
It depends on the context really. Sketch is still pretty common in iOS/macOS dev land, and I've seen it used pretty frequently in more "artistic" or experimental stuff, especially hybrid printed/web design projects. Its SVG exporter is also more capable than the one available in Figma.
It's also capable of pasting vector data from Adobe Illustrator, which makes it quite useful when pipelining web assets if you're dealing with vector art done by your art/design dept. or external artists.
It's clearly become a niche product, but it's still extremely useful for what it is.
What was even more wild was watching them clearly dump money into gimmicks and sales over their product. I worked at a large agency during invisions heyday and they were constantly pitching all levels of employees on whatever their new thing was, typically with sales people flying out for in person visits, buying whole office lunches, etc. I prob sat through a dozen pitches in a year where literally nothing about their product fundamentally improved or changed. People who had no idea what a design system was would pitch a half baked "design system manager" or similar, but were unable to really talk to any depth about design systems or answer questions about gaps in their product. It was very clear they would not succeed.