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InVision design collaboration services shutdown
- robg 3y agoWhat do you suggest instead?
- TechRemarker 3y agoFigma is essentially what destroyed InVision so that is where most everyone flocked to for collaboration.
- loceng 3y agoI think Sketch is maintaining a foothold, no? Avoids forever monthly recurring fees, even if they've not caught up yet offerings wise.
- patchorang 3y agoThey are not. If I was interviewing somewhere (I work as a UX designer) and they were still on Sketch, that be a pretty big red flag for me. Using Sketch today would be like using Illustrator during the Sketch era.
- roldie 3y agoIt's funny, I also consider it a red flag if they're still using Sketch. However, personally, I still want Sketch to succeed and return to being a viable option
- loceng 3y agoYou work for big corporate or?
- uxcolumbo 3y agoWhy? 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.
- sandofsky 3y agoUntil fairly recently, Figma was stuck in sRGB, while Sketch supported wide-gamut color. It blew my mind that designers were ok with this. 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.
- diiaann 3y agoAbout three years ago I joined a company that was on Sketch after working at a Figma company. I thought I was pretty tool agnostic but after starting work, I quickly realized how awful the Sketch workflow is. 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.
- easyThrowaway 3y agoIt depends on the context really. Sketch is still pretty common in iOS/macOS dev land, and I've seen it used pretty frequently in more "artistic" or experimental stuff, especially hybrid printed/web design projects. Its SVG exporter is also more capable than the one available in Figma. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karaterobot 3y agoFigma. InVision was always doomed, because it suffered from the problem that Figma did everything it did, plus a lot more, and it did it all better, with no step where you had to sync between the two apps, and you could do it with real-time collaboration, and...
- webwielder2 3y agoTo paraphrase Krusty the Clown, "one day you're the hottest name in the design industry, the next you're some schmo working in a box factory."
- jamestimmins 3y agoThe speed at which Figma replaced InVision was truly something to behold. I'd love to read a behind-the-scenes story of what it was like at InVision during this time.
- ayewo 3y agoIIRC InVision was losing momentum to Marvel app before Figma became popular. Not sure how Marvel app is faring.
- dannyw 3y agoI remember sketch!
- eruleman 3y agothe whole Sketch -> Invision -> Figma pipeline was quick — never seen incumbents displaced so quickly.
- danielvaughn 3y agoMakes you wonder what’s going to replace Figma.
- getlawgdon 3y agoms paint
- danielvaughn 3y agoreject modernity, return to tradition
- Animats 3y agoIs InVision also exiting the forum software area?
- edgyquant 3y agoThis is what I thought it was as well
- Andrex 3y agoThat's a blast from the past...
- istvanp 3y agoThat's a different company (Invision Power Services). This post refers to the design collaboration software company (InVisionApp).
- codetrotter 3y agoThe most mindblowing thing is that they still exist. https://invisioncommunity.com/ 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?
- throwup238 3y agocPanel most likely.
- Animats 3y agoIt's software as a service now. They host the forums.
- ajdude 3y agoNot exclusively, but they're definitely going towards that route. I'm still paying them huge amounts of money for the license to host their software on my own servers but people who do that is a shrinking population.
- paradox460 3y agoCan't say I'm sad to see them go. They always felt like a glorified power-point deck to me, and I hated getting mockups and designs in InVision, because there was no in-built redline like Zeppelin and Figma now have, and the designers I worked with often "forgot" to add said redlines. Giving me the raw PSD/AI file was preferable
- esafak 3y agoDo redlines here refer to size measurements, or suggested revisions? https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/781354942292031141 https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/781354942292031141
- throwup238 3y agoHopefully not the discriminatory real estate practice!
- paradox460 3y agoMeasurements. Basically the thing that says this is x padding, this is blue-4
- jwithington 3y agoso this is invision shutting down right? i couldn't really tell.
- sciurus 3y agoYes. From the FAQ at https://support.invisionapp.com https://support.invisionapp.com : > InVision will fully shut its doors shortly after December 31, 2024
- aethanol 3y agoHa yeah same, this announcement is confusing.
- kokanee 3y agoDon't worry everyone, it's only the design collaboration services
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _the_inflator 3y agoI remember when we managed to add InVision to the internal list of approved apps in a bank after years of struggle with CISO, and the moment it was available internally, Figma was suddenly the hot stuff, and no one wanted to stick with InVision. InVision was good, but Figma hit hard.
- mooreds 3y agoDoes mean the entire company is shutting down? It is unclear from the post.
- sciurus 3y agoYes. From the FAQ at https://support.invisionapp.com https://support.invisionapp.com : > InVision will fully shut its doors shortly after December 31, 2024
- nomilk 3y agoWhy don't they sunset unprofitable services but keep the profitable ones? Or did figma take all their customers? (a general assembly UX short-course I took in 2017 recommended InVision as the 'go to' wire framing tool, seems like a lot changed since).
- martinald 3y agoSeems extremely poor they couldn't have built a bulk export tool. The FAQ says documents have to be exported one by one. 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.
- nerdponx 3y agoIf you were the decisionmaker in this situation, would you build it?
- djur 3y agoWhy wouldn't I?
- kstrauser 3y agoRole-playing their CFO, “because if we had money for projects that don’t earn us money, we wouldn’t be closing down.” 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.”
- SkyPuncher 3y agoWhy would you? 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.
- djur 3y agoIf the company is already going under, why not do something kind before you go? Isn't preventing needless pain the right thing to do? This kind of seems like treating people badly just because one won't be around to receive any consequences.
- 3y ago
- kstrauser 3y ago> Is there a bulk export option? > 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.
- bdcravens 3y agoPerhaps this can be scripted via Playwright etc?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fortunate_dev 3y agoI know... was in the same boat not too long ago. I built a service to make parting with the platform easier (https://invisionbulkexport.com/ https://invisionbulkexport.com/). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
- jcomis 3y agoAs a designer, it was amazing to how badly invision was unable to move beyond their original simple prototyping platform. They were way ahead of the curve when they began and simply never did anything useful beyond that. 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.
- mortenjorck 3y agoInvision actually tried building its own Sketch clone! It's hard to find much about it today, but Invision Studio was an attempt to move up the value chain and build the design app that feeds the Invision prototyping experience. It was extremely ambitious, and it fell absolutely flat. 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.
- webwielder2 3y agoI think it was mostly a relaunch of Macaw.
- nickisnoble 3y agoThe thing is Macaw was pretty amazing when it came out, but relaunching the same app (3?) years later, with a worse UI, and bad / forced integrations into the rest of the Invision stack – not good.
- 3y ago
- mvdtnz 3y ago> On behalf of all InVisioners, For goodness sake, if you had to use one of these cutesie titles (you don't) why not InVisionaries?
- tessierashpool 3y agois there a way to reverse this trend? it seems to have decades of momentum behind it, but it should still be destroyed.
- neom 3y agoThe Information covered the downfall of InVision last year and it's fascinating: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/figma-took-their-lunch-money-how-2-billion-design-startup-invision-fell-apart https://www.theinformation.com/articles/figma-took-their-lun... Sorry it's The Information, I'm not aware of any paywall bypass.
- petarb 3y agoInVision was great when it first came on the scene. Used it to make nice prototypes from my Photoshop mockups and it felt revolutionary at the time. Then it felt like they never innovated after the initial product and failed attempt to capture the Sketch audience.
- uxcolumbo 3y agoNever understood what the appeal of Invision was. It was clunky. It wasn't a proper prototyping tool, just a gloried image hot-mapping tool. 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.
- aurareturn 3y ago>Never understood what the appeal of Invision was. 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.
- diiaann 3y agoI completely agree with the above poster that Invision was trash at any real prototyping. When it came out, Axure and Justinmind had already had sophisticated control flow logic. It did have a sleeker commenting system and most people I knew were too lazy to make more robust prototypes.
- aurareturn 3y agoInvision was free and simple to use by non-full-time designers.
- uxcolumbo 3y agoTrue. Primary use case was for easily sharing designs with your stakeholders. My comment was in the context of Figma. 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.
- ianwalter 3y agoWasn't InVision built on something crazy like ColdFusion?
- nsonha 3y agothat was the old InVision, new one is in React with go back-end.
- bdcravens 3y agoThere's some insight into it here from the founding CTO https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4109-working-code-podcast-episode-039-bens-future-at-invision.htm https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4109-working-code-podcast-epis...
- pembrook 3y agoThis is a reassuring signal that the market sometimes is entirely rational, and that product actually is more important than marketing/sales/distribution…at least in the design tools space. 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.
- maronato 3y agoIronic how their about page still says “The future of collaboration is here”. https://www.invisionapp.com/company https://www.invisionapp.com/company
- wbillingsley 3y agoSorry to see them go. I used them with students and they were always very helpful.
- oisino 3y agoI have interviewed and hired a couple engineers from Invison over the years. Internally they saw Figma coming but they got stuck in legacy tech dept. They did the cardinal sine of trying to rewrite big parts of their tech from scratch instead of shipping quickly in the direction they needed to go. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- fortunate_dev 3y agoI agree with the general sentiment here, it was a great tool, but wasn't able to keep up. Absolute leap forward from what came before it though. 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/ https://invisionbulkexport.com/). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
- yawnxyz 3y agoHere's more details from "Clark from Invision": https://twitter.com/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134 https://twitter.com/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134 https://nitter.net/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134 https://nitter.net/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134