InVision design collaboration services shutdown
invisionapp.com
invisionapp.com
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 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.
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.
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.
I'd love to read a behind-the-scenes story of what it was like at InVision during this time.
Not sure how Marvel app is faring.
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.
At the moment it looks like UXPin is going in this direction.
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.
I'm (slowly but steadily) working on this exact thing: https://matry.design
Invision never replaced Sketch. Invision took Sketch designs, and tried to make them interactive. They were a tandem.
Also, Sketch is still alive with diehard users.
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.
EDIT: clarity regarding prototyping needs.
Invision was not a design-to-developer handoff tool. It was a user research tool and a feedback tool for executives.
I made a hundred Invision prototypes for testing design ideas with customers back in the day.
But you could have achieved the same thing with Axure and if needed take it to the next level and add more interactivity beyond hot-mapping images.
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.
Mine at the time was purely on prototyping and Axure / Framer met those needs at the time.
I don't know when Invision introduced the redlining features, but I remember our team used Zeplin.
> 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.
Ouch.
InVision was good, but Figma hit hard.
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.
For goodness sake, if you had to use one of these cutesie titles (you don't) why not InVisionaries?
> InVision will fully shut its doors shortly after December 31, 2024
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 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.”
This is a one time pain for people that are already going to be frustrated with your product.
The big accounts that actually matter will simply ask their account manager to have this done for them.
This is how B2B almost always works. One rule for the masses. Then private, white glove service for the big accounts.
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.
https://invisioncommunity.com/
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?
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.
> InVision will fully shut its doors shortly after December 31, 2024
Sorry it's The Information, I'm not aware of any paywall bypass.
https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4109-working-code-podcast-epis...
If it's a great company, has great people and creates awesome products why would a design tool of their choice be a big red flag?
At least Sketch still offers perpetual licenses and it's a proper desktop app.
Monopolies aren't good for us - so having more than one design tool provider is healthy.
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.
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 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.