As 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.<p>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.
To 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."
Never understood what the appeal of Invision was. It was clunky. It wasn't a proper prototyping tool, just a gloried image hot-mapping tool.<p>And design to developer handover didn't exist either when I last had to use Invision.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Framer was even better for prototyping, but they pivoted to being a website creation tool, which was a smart move actually.<p>EDIT: clarity regarding prototyping needs.
> <i>Is there a bulk export option?</i><p>> 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.<p>Ouch.
I 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. <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...</a>
I 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.<p>InVision was good, but Figma hit hard.
This is a reassuring signal that the market sometimes is entirely rational, and that product <i>actually is</i> more important than marketing/sales/distribution…at least in the design tools space.<p>Invision focused on dumping millions into marketing and enterprise sales and growth hacks…yet had a mediocre piece of software.<p>Meanwhile, Figma created a better product (and I’d guess spent wayyy less on marketing for the first 5 years) and they won.
Seems extremely poor they couldn't have built a bulk export tool. The FAQ says documents have to be exported one by one.<p>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.
InVision 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.
Here's more details from "Clark from Invision": <a href="https://twitter.com/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134</a><p><a href="https://nitter.net/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.net/ClarkValberg/status/1743850775829246134</a>
I 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.<p>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 (<a href="https://invisionbulkexport.com/" rel="nofollow">https://invisionbulkexport.com/</a>). Disclaimer: I own this site and we are not affiliated with InVision in any way.
Ironic how their about page still says “The future of collaboration is here”.<p><a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/company" rel="nofollow">https://www.invisionapp.com/company</a>
Can'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
The Information covered the downfall of InVision last year and it's fascinating: <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/figma-took-their-lunch-money-how-2-billion-design-startup-invision-fell-apart" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinformation.com/articles/figma-took-their-lun...</a><p>Sorry it's The Information, I'm not aware of any paywall bypass.