InVision: Solid, But Falling Behind
Updated July 20, 2019
InVision: Solid, But Falling Behind
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with InVision
Our design team uses InVision primarily to create sharable prototypes for feedback. We do this by first creating wireframes in Sketch, Balsamiq, or Figma, then importing them into InVision. Then we add clickable “hotspots” to facilitate the drafted portrayal of a complete user journey when each frame is linked together to create a full clickable prototype. We primarily share these designs with internal stakeholders, such as with folks on the Revenue, Content Development, and Software Dev teams, for feedback, but we sometimes elicit external feedback on InVision prototypes. We have other tools for this purpose, but InVision is the one that we have used the longest and used most widely across our team.
- InVision is an easy-to-use tool for quickly putting together and editing prototypes in order to test and iterate upon user workflows.
- InVision's interface is modern and clear, making the user experience very pleasant and straightforward.
- InVision’s commenting and tracking features make it incredibly easy to communicate about specific parts of designs with stakeholders, as well as to follow those conversations. All of the feedback can be captured in one place, which is really helpful in revising designs.
- Designs can be very slow to load on mobile devices, particularly when they include many screens.
- There isn’t an offline version of the full app, which feels less-than-ideal for many of our teammates who live in areas with more spotty internet.
- There are limited functionalities to portray animations and transitions. This hasn’t been a huge issue, but it makes the app feel a little out of date, considering the range of such functionalities in other apps.
- InVision helps our team better and more professionally portray the value and the work we do as designers, leading to more company buy-in in supporting and funding our work. In the past, we would create PowerPoints with screenshots to portray a user workflow that we would share out to stakeholders. Once we began to use this app, where stakeholders could click through and comment as though they were “real” users, stakeholders began to better understand our work, designs, and workflows. This has led to more productive conversations that, in turn, lead to more effective end products that have more consistently served our business goals in tangible ways.
- InVision helps us save production time, effort, and cost, as we are able to solve design issues early in the process by having clickable prototypes to show to internal stakeholders and external users. It’s, understandably, difficult for people to provide effective feedback on screenshots. Using the clickable prototypes we created in InVision, we are able to get more effective feedback to solve user workflow issues before we spend time and money developing problematic designs (and later having to redesign them).
- It’s easier to market designs to potential buyers with clickable prototypes than with screenshots. With these prototypes, we’ve been able to sell more digital products before product release dates, which has helped to secure many contracts and new business relationships that continue to this day.
Compared to other tools, InVision is a very solid tool with a great reputation and prototyping functionalities to back it up. InVision was the first prototyping tool we purchased, and it’s served us really well. However, more and more design tools are now also providing prototyping functionalities, which makes using InVision less and less attractive. It’s rather convenient and time-saving to use the same tool for creating designs and prototypes, rather than two separate tools. We are aware that InVision has started to provide some design tools—however, they are below par compared to other apps, such as Sketch.