What is InVision?

InVision is one of the most popular design and collaboration tools for digital products. It's built by designers for designers, so it focuses on encouraging collaboration across different stages of product design, like prototyping, development, and testing. Through InVision you can also create interactive mockups for your wireframes.

This tool gives you control and clarity over your project. After adding the necessary elements and pages to your product design, you can also share the mockup with collaborators and stakeholders to get feedback.

Approximately 7 million people, including many Fortune 500 companies, use InVision to streamline their workflows. Many large companies like Airbnb, Slack, Starbucks and Uber use InVision. Regardless of responsibility or experience, all project members can use InVision to create a great user experience and design a better product.

What you can do with InVision

Here are some areas where you can use InVision.

Prototyping

You can easily create templates for your project using InVision tools. Prototypes are interactive and can be used to showcase the final look of the product. You can fully control the design and present your work in the best possible light.

InVision uses a drag-and-drop method to add different standardized attributes to your project. You can use it to add photos, drawings and designs from different sources such as system, server or cloud.

InVision Board allows you to customize your imported design. You can work on design elements, galleries, and collaborate on different brand assets through them. The board also supports many different types of design files.

Project management

InVision Workflow allows you to manage your project through screens. You can organize and assign screens using the Details tab. You can also create a task list where you can list comments and requirements.

Product owners can use the Activity tab to check project progress. You can also set due date and time and color labels for greater visibility of projects with deadlines.

Presentations for clients

The InVision Tours option allows you to take your stakeholders/users on a virtual tour of your prototype, that is, you can present the UX of your prototype, list the project's features and so on.

With this, you can guide your end users and draw their attention to the main components of the project. You can justify your project design/approach and answer any questions they may have. You can also demonstrate the changes/revisions your team has made since the last cycle and receive feedback on them.

Animation

Any designer who has used animation knows how difficult it is to add it to projects. You have to create the layers and then import them. Sometimes the frames aren't supported or the scaling is wrong and you have to rework the entire animation to fix it.

With InVision, you can easily add the animation layer via swipe transitions. It also allows timeline editing and automatic layer linking to avoid animation implementation issues. You can also edit multiple frames through it.

Advantages of using InVision

Effortless design

With drag and drop functionality, the design process of this tool is easy. You can create a prototype quickly and efficiently through it. You can also use Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox to upload designs.

Prototypes are clickable and can be accessed by both designers and clients. You can also add notes inside the demo slides for the designer to work on. You can also add a hover state to your prototype, meaning the customer can hover over a page element to see what that element does/how it changes. Hover states are really great for showing the dynamic nature of the application/prototype.

Mobile Prototype

Mobile prototyping often requires different tools than desktop prototyping. InVision, however, can do both. Through InVision, you can create mobile slide prototypes that can be controlled using gestures.

You can also add animations and transitions to your mobile prototype. Options like double tap, dissolve screen, swipe and swipe can be easily explored for different screen sizes and formats. You can also add components like rich pins and responsive design to mobile prototypes.

Communication

One of the most notable advantages of InVision is that it allows you to collaborate easily. It allows you to get instant answers, advice and feedback for your project. You might even get new ideas/approaches/advice on a topic unrelated to your project.

One of InVision's newest features is live sharing, meaning you can collaborate in real time with designers from around the world. It allows you to come together on a conference call or also participate in a chat with multiple people. You can also control a single mouse pointer to make design changes in real time.

Syncing

Once you have a global team collaborating on a single project, you'll need a sync and version control tool to understand the changes everyone applies to your project. This will help with storing the different iterations of your project. If necessary, you can work on a remote system and then synchronize changes without much hassle.

Through this tool, you can also check the version history. You can provide version-specific updates and share components of your project with different collaborators. Permissions management allows only specific people to change things in a specific version of the project. You can also manage projects in the cloud.

Is InVision free to use?

InVision is not free, but the company offers a free trial period with limited access to some tools. Through the free plan, you can create a prototype with unlimited screens. The free version also allows you to add unlimited collaborators to that prototype.

If you exceed the limit for a prototype, you will have 6 days of unlimited access to the prototype. After that, you will need to update your account to continue accessing additional prototypes. InVision has 3 pricing plans: free with limited features, professional with cross-collaboration teams, and enterprise with unlimited features.