Random question for anyone who uses InVision, as we're considering making it central to our process. Is it easy for frontend devs to recreate the designers' prototype in code? What pitfalls should we look out for?
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.
We've been testing most of the tools on the market (Zeplin, UX Pin, Avocode...). InvisionApp beat all of them.
The CSS specs invision spits out aren't helpful. If you are developing with a framework like React or Angular, and use a CSS preprocessor like SASS, then you have to rework everything invision gives you. It would be far easier if my designer would just email me a list of hex codes and some basic rules for font sizing and whitespace.
Indeed, I ran a survey on 8 devs, and I've been monitoring how they typically use it over the years (Invision, Zeplin, basic screenshot hosting...). Some Devs won't use the specs at all, sometimes delivering something off. Others, love it since it will reduce the back and forth during audits.
You're right, specs will only be usefull to provide the dimensions and colors. However, this part is automated on the UX side, it prevents us from writing it down, which would be a waste of time: Mockups always change, we'd have to manually update the said specs so many times... This wouldn't scale well.
Now I start to understand why people like InVision! I've always preferred Avocode