InVision’s decline makes me sad. I was an early adopter. I remember the joy of no longer having to string JPGs together with my own crappy HTML, the thrill of collaborative commenting and feedback right on the designs themselves.

The future was here!

I was an evangelist. When I joined TED in 2013, I convinced our CTO to get seats for the team. I was so enamored of the product, InVision interviewed me about collaboration at TED. I penned a piece for their blog, and contributed to at least one of their design listicles.

Things started to change, though, gradually at first, then with increasing velocity. Sketch hit the market, and we no longer needed to go through the rigamarole of exporting screens from Photoshop Layer Comps. To keep up, InVision added support for Sketch import and, later, Figma and XD.

Things were still good on the InVision train, at least for us designers.

But for InVision, the writing was on the wall. Or, it should have been. These new design tools were a sign: each launched with limited prototyping capabilities, giving designers the ability to link screens and create simple interactions without having to make a trip to InVision.

Figma hit hardest, promising the kind of interaction, collaboration, commenting, and handoff features that were InVision’s stock in trade. Slowly, other players dribbled into the market, tearing away at InVision’s feature set bit by bit, including developer handoff tools like Zeplin and Marvel, as well as prototyping tools like Flinto, Framer, and ProtoPie.

Designers want each tool to solve a unique set of problems as thoroughly and adeptly as possible; they don’t want a loosely associated set of tools that solve niche problems moderately well.

Meanwhile, back at InVision, things were getting confusing. Every few months I’d get a call from yet another “account manager” who wanted to talk to me about how InVision could best serve my team. I gave the same responses each time:

• More robust prototyping, interaction and animation tools
• Improvements to the code inspector for dev handoff
• Ability to organize my projects into folders (for the love of God!)
• Easier account and user maintenance

Instead, InVision broadened their product offering, introducing Boards for curating moodboards, Freehand for digital whiteboarding, and Design System Manager for, well, managing your design system. While interesting and useful, each product felt niche and a bit undercooked. Miro, for example, now does what Freehand promised, but does so much better. In other words, InVision’s product vision seemed fractured and meandering. I’m sure on paper it sounded great: InVision solves all the challenges facing the modern design studio.

The truth, though, is that designers want each tool to solve a unique set of problems as thoroughly and adeptly as possible; they don’t want a loosely associated set of tools that solve niche problems moderately well.

During one phone call with an account rep, a nice guy I’ll call Jim (because I don’t remember his name…might’ve been Steve), I said, “Why don’t you just build an all-in-one design tool? Everything from initial concept to final prototype.” Jim / Steve had a smile in his voice when he said, somewhat coyly, “Just wait. We’re on it.” Well, that sounded promising!

If you want a designer or design team to adopt your product, the value of switching has to be evident and obvious immediately.

Shortly thereafter, I read that InVision was preparing to launch Studio, a silver bullet for the modern interaction designer. No more traveling back and forth between a hodgepodge of design, prototyping, and dev handoff tools, Studio promised to be the all-in-one we had been waiting for. The product home page was splashy. InVision was hosting a big launch party in New York. The moment we’d been waiting for was at hand. I signed up for the beta.

My first impression: “This is lovely. But where are the sophisticated animation tools? How can I build robust interactive prototypes?” Don’t worry, we were told. All that is coming. While Studio felt like a lesser, if sparklier, version of the tools we already had, it had its allure: dark mode before dark mode was a thing; platform-agnostic; animation tools that, if not robust, were intuitive and intriguing.

Nonetheless, switching costs in a studio are high. If you want a designer or design team to adopt your product, the value of switching has to be evident and obvious immediately. That just wasn’t the case with Studio. Worse, as InVision was already frustrating designers with its inability to deliver features they were clamoring for, there wasn’t a reservoir of trust InVision could tap into. In other words, being told Studio would ultimately deliver on its promises didn’t instill confidence. Meanwhile, the flagship collaboration product was growing creakier and more cluttered.

When your core user base has a specific and evolving set of needs, you need to meet those needs better than anyone else, and you have to adapt quickly as those needs evolve to hold the competition at bay.

By this point in its existence, InVision had deep knowledge about designers and design teams, as well as their wants, needs, and workstreams. While goodwill was ebbing, InVision still owned a good portion of the design process for many teams. Sketch was a more robust design tool, but its collaboration tools were non-existent and it was Mac-only. Figma promised cross-platform support, as well as true collaboration and interaction design, but it was still a youngster. XD seemed more intent on reaching parity with its upstart peers than leapfrogging ahead.

Had Studio lived up to its promise at launch—or at least given sufficient evidence that it would do so soon after—we might be using it today. Instead, we balked. As I write this, I don’t know of a single designer or design team that uses Studio regularly, if at all. Do you?

More bad news was brewing for InVision: many teams started to abandon its core collaboration product in favor of tools like Figma and Sketch for Teams. This seems inevitable in retrospect; adoption of those tools was already high, so when they began to introduce more robust collaboration and interaction tools, paying for InVision seats was unsustainable. In fact, however, this wasn’t inevitable. Again, if Studio had delivered on its promise to be the best cross-platform design tool with robust interaction, animation, collaboration and dev handoff features, things might have been different. Very different.

In a competitive market your MVP needs to demonstrate a key differentiator, or at least make a credible promise that the differentiator will be coming soon.

In other words, InVision should have gone all-in on Studio. Instead of splitting their attention across multiple products, Studio should have been the tentpole in their product suite. With Studio at the center of the product suite, all the other products come along for the ride. This isn’t novel product thinking. Adobe has done this for decades with Photoshop and Illustrator, and Microsoft did it with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Heck, Invision did it themselves for a solid decade! They made themselves the center of the designer’s universe with their collaboration tool, thus opening the door (not to mention hearts and minds) to all their other products. For some reason, though, they lost the plot with Studio.

Or, as Fabricio Teixeira wrote back in 2018, “InVision Studio’s success will depend on factors that speak more to product strategy than to specific product features.” Bingo.

So what can we learn from this story, half-written as it may be?

• An MVP approach comes with risks, especially when you’re entering a maturing market. If your MVP offers table stakes compared to your competition, it’s going to be incredibly hard to get people to switch. Put another way, in a competitive market, your MVP needs to demonstrate a key differentiator, or at least make a credible promise that the differentiator will be coming soon.
• When your core user base has a specific and evolving set of needs, you need to meet those needs better than anyone else, and you have to adapt quickly as those needs evolve to hold the competition at bay.
• Having grand visions is a lovely and admirable thing, but you need to keep a laser focus on your core business. Fail there, and the shiniest blog or handiest plugin won’t save you. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Be willing to jettison anything that distracts you from your core business.
• Listen to the people who use your product. That stupid (and untrue) Henry Ford aphorism has done a lot of damage; bottom line, people can and do tell you what they want. Listen to their requests and complaints, and plan your product vision accordingly. (InVision did the former, but not the latter.)
• The more you hype your product, the more people expect. If your product isn’t near an end-state, either don’t launch it or launch it with humility and grace. Let people in on the process; ask for feedback; make it clear you’re iterating with their guidance. This builds goodwill, whereas overpromising and underdelivering destroys it.
• Brand loyalty is a wonderful thing, but it can also be maddeningly fickle. Keep delivering on your core brand promise or get burned. Ouch.

Here’s the wild part: I still don’t see a product that does what Studio promised. Figma perhaps comes closest, but unless you’re willing to modify its core workflow with all manner of plugins, you still can’t create sophisticated animations or interactions (but props for its game-changing collaboration features). There’s still no magic bullet, no single tool that lets you design, build, and share prototypes, as well as most designers, would like. In other words, there’s still an unmet need.

My guess is one or more of the existing products, probably Figma, will evolve to the point where this need is met. Or, it might be some upstart we haven’t heard much about yet. Whatever the case, it could have been Studio.

Although I rarely dip my toes in the InVision pool these days, I have fond memories of the product that allowed me to advance my design practice in ways that, until then, were a challenge at best, impossible at worst. If Studio had done all that it promised, I’d be writing to tell you how and why it’s the best app for the job. More importantly—for InVision at least—I’d be using it on a daily basis instead of Figma and ProtoPie.