InVision, valued at $1.9B, picks up $115M Series F

I think it's a pretty good product, and has grown fast (hence the valuation) but they really need to improve the core product. It's got too many bugs and feels like it's had zero effort in the past 1-2 years.

Sketch and Figma now have very similar clickthrough prototyping tools built in, and it's probably a question of time until they catch up.

I've seen the same sentiment from other InVision users, including myself. It seems like they spread themselves too thin when they started working on InVision studio. Almost to the point where I wonder how much usability testing they actually do these days on their core product. Which is ironic coming from a company whose whole point of existence is to facilitate that sort of thing.

I was giving them the benefit of doubt for a while and waiting for them to get their act together. But all hope was lost when I got their last survey where they had me categorize a boat load of features into four buckets: must haves, should haves, nice to haves, and I think shouldn't haves. I think I categorized 90% of the features into nice-to-haves, and the rest in should haves. Of course, there was no "don't know, don't care" bucket. And not one of the "features" was "improve the existing user experience".

So I feel like they are falling into the usual trap of piling on features to the product, and they are not listening to their existing users to improve the current (core) product.

But I get it, one must feed the beast in order to raise $115M.

Have you heard of/tried Marvel App? (marvelapp.com) I tried InVision but the syncing between sketch and Invision was so laggy I couldn't deal with it. I found Marvel and have been happily giving them my money ever since. Granted I am not really a "designer" so I'm not in it every day but I really like how easy it is to sync and it's pretty well integrated into Sketch: http://cloud.cityzen.com/2281d62e5564

You can see there that the Sync buttons for Marvel sit right on top of the list of artboards. Pricing is on point as well.

I echo the sentiment. I’ll add my experience... Using InVision at a large company is a nightmare. It’s slow, buggy. You can’t trust it. It’s failed on me so many times I can’t count anymore.

> Unfortunately after writing this, I realized it's all about the customer base so never mind. Actually, can someone create Customer Base as a Service (CBaaS) to facilitate connecting startups with customers?

Someone did. It's called Google, and businesses pay through the nose for a chance to reach customers through it :)

It's not just about the product, it's about tons of other things. Especially for a design centric company like InVision, the money is used to hire brand marketers, salespeople, staff out support functions, and build a global distribution engine.

For these late rounds, it's not just about building out the product like Seed/A. These are "win the market" investments that give companies a war chest to go compete or carve out a market niche.

There are a few VCs that handle indie businesses, such as www.indie.vc, www.earnestcapital.com, etc.

I've often thought about how tricky/silly it must be to work in some domains using tools of other domains.

For example, I work with cartographic data and the darn mathies and programmers stole all our words. So I end up performing a map on a Map of maps. Or managing vector of vector layers. Naming is hard but this is ridiculous.

Using mockup tools to make mockup tools probably has its own set of ridiculous collisions.

My favorite recursive entity is the Stanford Academic Senate’s Committee on Committees. I imagine the inaugural meeting, called to order some time in 1957, is still ongoing to this day.

It's not too different from having a C compiler written in C. Once you bootstrap[1] the first version, you can create subsequent versions from the first one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29

It just looks like a remote desktop to localhost so you get one of those "mirrors to infinity" views.

I think most great products have that recursive iterative cycle.

Our development agency has switched completely to Figma. As a developer there are only a couple things I like about it better (invision completely breaks the back button), but the biggest gains seem to come from our designers as well as the collaboration its enabled with clients.

Yep, it is a fat client with lousy performance. They tried to build Sketch + Principle in the same tool. Both those tools are super complicated software products. They should have created separate tools which complement each other.

Oh God no, I don't want a slow entity like InVision hampering the progress of one of the best design tools on the market, Figma.

This is definitely worth highlighting. Why so many businesses are still deluding themselves into thinking that work is better done when cramming people into an office is beyond me. Remote work is still the minority. My hypothesis is that it's actually just covert ego/power/distrust at play because founders and executives like to be able to say they have an office, and they like to see their employees "working." This mostly only applies to "new" businesses though (i.e. founded in the last 5-10 years); older businesses have an excuse because they're just doing what they already know.

In any case, huge respect to InVision for being one of the leaders in advocating remote work.

Is inVision Opensource? How do they prevent source code leak if everyone works remotely?

Probably cheap capital in case the markets turn down. It's expected that the venture capital money will dry up a bit and the fed raising interest rates means that taking loans will be more expensive. I've seen a lot of VCs say if you can take it now, take it.

There might be, but I think the real question should be closer to: "Are there no other avenues for securing capital that are close to your ARR with costs as low as you'd get during a new funding round?"

I don't have an answer to your question, but access to cheap capital is just one reason why you may want to fundraise when the money isn't necessary.

My advice is to skip 1 and 2.

She should learn Photoshop/Illustrator (or equivalent software) and recreate famous interfaces. (Facebook, Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) If she can get them to be pixel perfect, she has enough technical skill and can start exploring.

She should work on industry tools right away. She should skip theory - she'll learn more from doing. She can go back to theory if she feels like she's missing something.

100% not MS Paint or Paint.net...

Tell her to download Adobe XD, it's free right now and that's the standard in the industry.

#3, I wouldn't call that dragdrop but at this point, it'd make more sense for her to learn a vector program for the things that Adobe XD can't do. That would require Illustrator and would be a better use of her time.

For #4 you will have to have a good understanding of HTML to be able to do anything with CSS- that has to be the foundation before she learns CSS.

1. Don't use anything Microsoft, use Figma or XD. Figma is free for individuals, and XD is part of Creative Cloud.

2. This is a good start, but if she wants to get into UX she should start by reading articles at Neilsen Norman[0], UX Planet[1], or Interaction Design

3. See #1, although frankly it pays to do wireframes on paper before even touching a mouse/trackpad.

4. I would say at this point that HTML/CSS is a "nice to have" skill. I believe that Figma now contains a basic interaction design suite (i.e. tap, swipe, scroll) that lets you go between different screens.

5. I'd say to stick with learning how/when different charts should be used rather than trying to jump into something like HighCharts or D3.

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/

[1] https://uxplanet.org/

[2] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature

There are two aspects, the tools and the knowledge. What people recommend above will just teach UI (How to build), but not UX (why to build it this way and how to approach the problem).

For the tools, it's like in software engineering, you need pick the your "stack" (which wil depends on the goals and deliverable). Do NOT use Paint / Photoshop to build mockups, you will waste your time and hate your job. Get a Sketch License, find a good tutorial online (Udemy and co).

To master the field, study the fundamentals: cognitive sciences, human factors, cognitive ergonomics and design patterns, the goal is to understand how the brain works, perception, memory, decision making, limits...

Basic computer science is going to give an edge.

Basic knowledge in experiment design will be necessary to test your design with rigor (UX Researcher).

Would suggest learning some usability as well. Don't Make Me Think is a good one. Also, read up on Nielsen Group's publications

I'd say skip step 1, there is lots of cheap and better UI design tools out there (see Sketch, Figma, et al), and they are very easy to learn.

Start by trying to replicate UI designs in the wild, it is incredible helpful! It helps you develop your taste and understanding of relationship between different elements, spacing, layout, grids… soon enough you start to see patterns emerge, which you can use when working on your own designs.

Focus on learning typography: it’s no secret that UI is mostly typography, if you get it right that is the job! Get a good book such as “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst – although is focused on print design, the core principles are transferable to digital.

Hope that helps!

She could probably do #1 on paper or in step #3. I'm using Figma in step #3 recently and like it a lot. Step #2 is critical and ongoing and would be a much longer list of books, I'd think.

1. Jump straight to Figma.

2. Yes, and also grids and Google's Material Design. The MD spec is the most coherent document on a design language I have ever read. While it's not necessary to follow it to the letter, studying it would be definitely helpful.

3. Figma is better (and free for a single user).

How do you define a startup? I thought it's usually defined as a company that's more focused on growth than profit and return to shareholders. That would not limit the number of funding rounds

Sure it is, they're still raising venture capital, and they haven't exited yet. It's a startup, just in its later stages.

> Is it easy for frontend devs to recreate the designers' prototype in code?

No. The designers have to build the designs in a very particular way in order to get anything useful from invision. Good luck telling your design team that the way they build their sketch files is all wrong.

I have used invision professionally for 2 years now, it is a glorified screenshot host. It's biggest pitfall is that you have to use it in a very particular way, otherwise it's totally useless.

Invision is only okay. It's bloated and sluggish with a cramped UI. I think Zeplin and Avocode are both superior products. And that's just if you are required to use Sketch - if you have the freedom to make the swap to Figma you should just do that imo.

Well currently their main application is inaccessible, so you have the issue of downtime making it impossible to see anything you've made. Collaboration is cool but even mature applications like GitHub have downtime sometimes that seriously interrupts operations at downstream companies. Always consider this before relying on a service for something core to the business.

Invision is great for quick clickthroughs, and commenting on specific parts of designs. But for handover of Sketch designs, I think Figma works the best - it's cross platform and opens Sketch files well.

Kind of. My workflow is whiteboarding to Sketch to Invision, and you have to manually select assets for export in Sketch in order for it to show up in Invision. However, this is only or elements such as icons. For elements such as text, you can simply click on it in Inspect mode to view the font family, style, etc. You can also toggle whether you want to view the code in CSS, LESS, SASS, etc.

If the designs are uploaded correctly, you can see CSS snippets for different UI elements. Definitely helps to recreate it faster.

I would jump over to the Indie Hackers site and ask for feedback there. I'm sure it will spark a useful conversation.

From my quick survey of your marketing site, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the UX on mobile. I would suggest working with a designer to improve the graphics and checking that the layout works on different browsers/OSes/breakpoints. Might be easiest just to start over with a premade template for the marketing site.

I think your marketing website is weak. It doesn't look as if it was targeted to designers, who I assume is your target audience.

From the article, sounds like good old fashioned customers who need a mock-up app and are willing to pay.

As a general rule, these kinds of comments are not helpful and don't add to the discussion in any way. As the other respondent said, if you don't like the product, please let us know why! I've used InVision and have always liked it, but I've really only used it from a "designers sent me an InVision deck to build", so I'm genuinely interested in how other stakeholders may find problems with it.

I get why this was down-voted to the bottom, but I COMPLETELY agree with this person.

InVision seems to me to be a company without a vision. I think their tools are only useful for prototyping things that are so simplistic that they don't require a prototype. I know art directors that like it for sharing visual designs with clients. I despise it for prototyping complicated applications. The workflow is disjointed, confusing, and under-powered.

What do you hate about it? I've had a good and seamless experience with their software.