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Invision bought Trunk and closes it(invisionapp.com)

almost 5 years ago from Tomas Anthony, Product Designer

  • Joe CJoe C, almost 5 years ago

    Seems like this as a good place as any to pile on criticismrants feedback about Invision.

    I too am in the process of moving my whole team off of Invision as our platform for sharing prototypes etc. 3 years ago it was the go-to, everything was working smoothly and the "quirks" I figured would be ironed out as the product matured. (Example quirk: when setting up a link in the web app you can search by screen name in the dropdown...unless you are adding the link as an overlay. Then you have to scroll in a seemingly randomly ordered list of 300+ screens. I reported this over 2 years ago and got a jolly "We're aware of this issue and we're keeping it in mind for v7").

    The last year has been a horrible experience full of regret that we adopted Invision so heavily. I'm constantly getting seeing people struggling with syncing/craft updates/performance/downtime/speed and downright confusion, especially for clients. (add in some aggressive sales tactics/lack of transparency about direction/constant content marketing and you've got a real tire fire).

    Our shop is not, it seems, the intended audience of Studio. We do not use animation at all in our prototypes, and most of our work is desktop enterprise software. I have no use for the kinds of app screen animation-transitions that seem to be the selling point of Studio. This isn't a problem, I don't think all products need to be geared towards my use case at all. However, Studio is being pushed as a All-in-one screen design tool and a replacement for the web-app we use today.

    Reading what I'm writing here, it seems I'm just salty that I thought they were building a simple product that suited my work perfectly, only to see the company go in a different direction while still (somewhat) leading us on with the launch of v7 of the core product. I am embarrassed that I helped to convert team members to the tool previously, and I don't think I'd ever be able to adopt anything from Invision again.

    Unfortunately, there is no other alternative I would recommend instead. Sketch's prototype solution is good enough for now, and once we get overlays then I'll be satisfied I think. XD can also do this now, so I think us in the 'boring' design space will need to stick to the core basics of these tools.

    /rant

    Edit: markdown

    12 points
    • Kris PuckettKris Puckett, almost 5 years ago

      Hey Joe! Thank you for the honest feedback. Clearly we missed the mark with y'all, and while I bummed about that, I know we can be better. I'm the design community manager for InVision, and would love to chat with you, if you are interested. I'm so sorry you've had this experience, and I would love to see how we can make it better.

      -8 points