InvisionApp with Craft Synch - a MUST for Sketch shops
May 29, 2018
InvisionApp with Craft Synch - a MUST for Sketch shops
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with InVision
My digital agency's design team uses Invision to present designs to clients. The development team occasionally uses "Invision Inspect" to build templates. In the past, we presented designs to clients in one of two ways:
Using Invision allows us to have more control over the client's viewing experience. It allows us to present our digital designs on a digital medium.
- A physical print out
- A PDF sent over email
Using Invision allows us to have more control over the client's viewing experience. It allows us to present our digital designs on a digital medium.
- Comments: Invision allows your clients to make comments on a design template. Gone are the days of trying to decipher a client's red-sharpie markup on a printed design. Invision comments are neat and organized, and closely tied to on-page elements. Read comments individually or answer several at once in the "comments" pane. Clients receive responses to their comments via email.
- Invision Inspect: Invision Inspect is amazing. If you are synching designs to Invision using the Craft or Sketch integrations (which I recommend), all of the CSS and HTML code will be auto-generated by Invision Inspect. Developers can use the Inspect pane to accelerate development
- Hotspots: With invision, you can create "hotspots" on your design, allowing you to create a very realistic-feeling experience for your clients. Select a button as a hotspot to link it to another page of your design. You can also assign hot spots to anchor link to another position on the existing page. The end result is immersive and allows the client to better understand the relationship between pages of your design. It offers functionality to an otherwise static thing.
- Mobile: Invision displays mobile mocks inside of a mobile phone template. This adds to the realism and creates a more professional, polished look. You can also lock the header nav or footer on mobile devices to simulate "sticky" elements, which again, really adds a realistic quality.
- Integrations: Automatically synch your designs directly from Sketch to Invision using the Craft plugin. This is fantastic because it allows your clients to view changes, practically in real-time, without requiring you to login to multiple platforms to make updates
- Drains resources: Invision is HEAVY. I can't pull up more than one Invision tab on my laptop or else it will start to crawl. It drains my computer's resources.
- Ordering screens: While the auto-synch from Craft and/or Sketch is amazing, it's not as good as it could be. I am working on a 200+ screen project with a client. Every time my designer synchs using the Craft plugin, I need to search through Invision to see where it dropped the new or updated screens. It is seemingly random, and very hard to keep track of. I need to audit the organization of screens weekly to make sure everything is where it should be. This is extremely hard to do on a small laptop with a touchpad, since it relies on a drag-and-drop interface, but it's no problem with a mouse.
- Email overload: The default notification settings will send you an email each time someone leaves a comment on a mock. This is a nightmare for my zen at work - be sure to change the setting to receive a daily or weekly digest instead
- Responsiveness: Invision hasn't really cracked the secret of displaying responsive designs through a static medium. We typically create desktop and mobile mocks for our website projects. You can't load mocks with different canvas sizes to the same project - they must be uploaded to two separate projects. This is a pain to manage. Ideally, I'd love to be able to resize my screen and show my client how the design "jumps" from desktop to mobile at a particular breakpoint. This is not possible.
- Intuitiveness: There are some parts of Invision that are incredibly intuitive, and some that aren't. Maybe this is just me, but it took me a year to realizze you could shift+click to select multiple screens for the purposes of re-ordering. There are a few things like that that just didn't feel "natural" to me.
- Using Invision reduces the number of revisions we have to make on designs for our clients. Previously, when we presented digital designs on paper, clients would suggest a bunch of changes simply because they didn't "get" what they were looking at. We would then either have to make those changes or spend time explaining how things would actually look on a computer. Invision cuts out that back-and-forth
- Invision allows us to socialize designs to large client teams. We are currently working on a project with 100s of stakeholdeers. Every time we update a design in Sketch, we synch it to Invision. Stakeholders have a permanent link to the Invision project, and can always stay abreast of our changes. This again cuts down on communication time because we don't need to alert clients every time something changes.
- Invision allows us to appear more professional. Presenting designs on paper or via PDF can come off as a little amateur. Presenting designs in a digital-first platform with enhanced capabilities such as commenting makes us look good.
- Marvel
We compared Invision to MarvelApp, Notism, and ViewFlux before purchasing. Admittedly, it has been quite a while since we made that purchase decision, so these platforms may have changed significantly. However, at the time of purchase, we went with Invision because of its integration options. Since our design team uses Sketch for everything, it was a no-brainer for us to choose the app with the simplest Sketch-synching capabilities.