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

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

#61

Post by psweber »

CameronBanga wrote: post #4

In my 9 years of making mobile apps, I've never hated a tool more than I've hated InVision. But congrats to the team on this pick up I suppose.

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.

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

#62

Post by felideon »

nf__85 wrote: post #43

As someone who uses InVision daily, I have become more and more frustrated with the experience. Building a large project feels like building a house of cards. I often run into small but infuriating UX issues inside their app. One example of this is uploading artboards from Sketch using the InVision Craft plugin. Uploading a new artboard that has the same name as a previously uploaded artboard overwrites the original…

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.

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

#63

Post by seanalltogether »

jdhn wrote: post #26

If I were Invision, I would either invest in or buy out Figma, and have it replace Invision Studio. Figma is on the up and up, and from what I heard Invision Studio looked good, but the execution was poor.

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.

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

#64

Post by dharma1 »

nf__85 wrote: post #43

As someone who uses InVision daily, I have become more and more frustrated with the experience. Building a large project feels like building a house of cards. I often run into small but infuriating UX issues inside their app. One example of this is uploading artboards from Sketch using the InVision Craft plugin. Uploading a new artboard that has the same name as a previously uploaded artboard overwrites the original…

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.

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

#65

Post by dharma1 »

reneherse wrote: post #11

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?

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.

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

#66

Post by etimberg »

porker wrote: post #22
etimberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then none of the ones I've worked on have been uploaded correctly. They were always static PNGs of the design. Now I start to understand why people like InVision! I've always preferred Avocode

I think the secret is uploading photoshop files directly

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

#68

Post by cityzen »

nf__85 wrote: post #43

As someone who uses InVision daily, I have become more and more frustrated with the experience. Building a large project feels like building a house of cards. I often run into small but infuriating UX issues inside their app. One example of this is uploading artboards from Sketch using the InVision Craft plugin. Uploading a new artboard that has the same name as a previously uploaded artboard overwrites the original…

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.

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

#69

Post by cityzen »

dharma1 wrote: post #64
nf__85 wrote: post #43

As someone who uses InVision daily, I have become more and more frustrated with the experience. Building a large project feels like building a house of cards. I often run into small but infuriating UX issues inside their app. One example of this is uploading artboards from Sketch using the InVision Craft plugin. Uploading a new artboard that has the same name as a previously uploaded artboard overwrites the original…

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.

Wow, I had no idea sketch added prototyping. Since I only use it when I'm not writing code I don't really keep up with the features but... wow! Thanks for the tip!

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

#70

Post by talldan »

escaper wrote: post #16
InGodsName wrote: post #12

Hey UI/UX experts, I am wondering how should you go about mastering UI/UX of mobile app/web app. I've a girlfriend who wants to start in this area but is pretty clueless. Can anyone please provide a path to follow? Is this good: 1. Learn UI design in Paint.net/MS Paint 2. Read book on color theory, typography, whitespace 3. Design in dragdrop software like photoshop/illustrator 4. Learn CSS and recreate your design i…

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 an…

There isn't really a standard at the moment in my opinion, though from personal experience Sketch + InVision are the most commonly used. Figma is picking up a lot of interest. I've never seen a UI designer use Adobe XD.

Skills learnt in one tool should be fairly transferable, so it doesn't matter too much. Just don't use photoshop.

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