InVision - Design & Prototype Reviews

I desperately wanted to like this app, but currently, the experience on my iPad Pro may be one of the worst, inconsistent, and buggy apps in its class. It’s clear that the team has only given the mobile experience a passing consideration as many features, and especially the Freehand section, are so riddled with bugs that it’s almost unusable.

For example, trying to change the shape tool in Freehand sometimes offers up the expected menu for another choice, but more often than not, it won’t. Instead, it will end up “selecting” the option below it as if I were trying to copy and paste the icon. Even once I get it to select what I’m looking for, it frequently fails to actually draw anything as if another action is being performed. The only way to “fix” any of these compounding issues is to completely exit the document and come back in to work for a few minutes more and repeat the process.

Part of what makes this so frustrating is the amount of potential here. This very well could have been my highlight discovery as in concept, it’s almost everything I could have asked for, but the execution is so bad, I’m considering abandoning the desktop experience as well. How InVision ever saw the light of day in this state is beyond my understanding.

InVision is useless except for viewing comments. InVision crashes after viewing any of my teams various prototypes after about 30 seconds. This happens every single time, for every single prototype. These crashes defeat the entire purpose of downloading and using the application.

The UX of InVision doesn’t matter if InVision crashes every time you try to view a profile. Useless! this app really needs to pay more attention to squashing bugs, not only on this application, but on the web based application as well on desktop. I’ve sent their support team multiple problems/tickets when trying to expand groups in a prototype and not being able to expand or collapse groups of mock-ups. They offered no support and told me they would tell the product team. Here it is a year later and it’s still a huge issue with both myself using it, as well as my entire UX team of 18 team members. Not good!

Very disappointed in this app’s quality. It could be great if only a few bugs were taken care. Without fixes, the bugs completely cripple the experience and usage on mobile and desktop.

I’ve seen many other reviews on this and I do not understand how so many voices failed to be recognized. After all, they are just your users....

1. First and foremost, who decided that locking the rotation was a good idea? I understand the hypothesis, but in actual practice, this is terribly annoying in every way possible. this app is not merely just a ‘mirror’ app — it doesn’t absolutely *have* to maintain its original design spec environment. When viewing mobile designs on an iPad, its rotated 45º because I’m on a landscape view on the iPad. We have an email thread of 182 employees in my company raving on about how badly this has disrupted our pipeline. Moving to Figma seems like a no-brainer now.

2. NOTHING on iOS platforms reveal the ability to manage your projects or art boards. A large chunk of people are actually moving entirely to iPad and mobile to do 90% of their design ‘management’. I cant invite anyone to a project, modify ‘share’ settings, delete an artboard or project, drag anything around, inspect code...nothing. It’s confusing. It’s been this way for several years and I’ve written about this at least 4x now (that I’ve found emails on).

3. Lastly, I just found out that, even on the iPad (as with mobile), I can’t view projects on the web browser. I’m done with it. I’ve given this app over 4 yrs to change this stuff and other tools are running laps in front of the improvements you’ve so slowly made.

As involved as this app is with the modern day design industry, it’s very odd how little attention or care their mobile app seems to get.

InVision is lacking in almost every way. In fact the only thing it does well is allow you to tap through prototypes. That’s fine, but only accounts for about 10% of what the full this app platform offers.

1. No settings. It’s impossible to do any kind of editing or configuring of your prototypes. Something as simple as allowing me to enable or disable the status bar on the fly seems like a no-brainer. This is literally a read-only application (apart from comments)

2. No Apple Pencil support. Their desktop version has a great freehand tool that allows you to scribble notes on your screens. You would *think* they would extend that tech to the iPad + Apple Pencil, but it is noticeably absent. The iPad app is just an upscaled version of the iPhone one and gives the middle finger to anyone trying to use the iPad as a serious professional tool.

3. No workflow access. Again InVision is lacking basic features from the web version that would be incredibly easy to implement.

4. Activity Feed? Permissions? Account management? All missing.

To be honest I wouldn’t as disappointed about this as I am if this app didn’t block you from accessing the site on a mobile browser. There is no reason I shouldn’t be able to use Safari on my iPad Pro to make quick edits or changes to prototypes or account management.

Let me first start by saying the Desktop Web version of this tool deserves 3-4 stars. It is very useful, however, it does come with many set back. There will be a new version release soon in which many features will be enhanced, but currently the tool is far from “perfect”... or great.

Now on to Mobile... never mind, just don’t waste your time using mobile. Login through Safari, or whatever browser app you use and go with the web version. You’ll find really stupid things on the mobile version, like having to turn your iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard to portrait mode to sign in. Then after you’re forced to download THE ENTIRE project from scratch to your device, which is a nightmare if hot fixes are being applied by designers when you’re on the go... InVision will just crash a moment later when trying to do anything.

Really hope they resolve these issues in the new version being released soon. Will update review if I’m satisfied.

Big fan of desktop experience, navigation and IA. Unfortunately none of that translates to the mobile app. In fact a lot of the hierarchy like spaces/sections do not translate on mobile (at least in an intuitive way) which makes it very difficult to navigate and find the pages you actually want to preview.

One example of an unintuitive interaction is returning to your dashboard after you click into a prototype - very unclear and I still find myself randomly tapping/swiping in order to get back - if i don’t just quit InVision . Another is how the sections translate on mobile - instead of seeing the section titles, I just see the project name repeated. Why not just show the section titles? Would love to see better integration between desktop and mobile - especially for viewing mobile prototypes.

(UPDATE) as I’ve been using it I’ve realized there are some very weird user experience interactions in InVision. I work at a UX agency, and I have to say with the this app app I’m always finding interactions where I have to stop and think “how the heck do they call this a good user experience.” For being a UX focused company, I’m disappointed in them.

At this point I’ve come to expect that I can do everything on my iPad Pro that I can do on my laptop, however with the this app app that isn’t the case yet.

They’ve made great strides with the recent edition of freehand, but now I would very much like to make my own boards from my iPad whenever inspiration strikes, rather than it being a desktop only feature.

Overall, I love using this app to share project design prototypes with clients. The clean UI makes for a great experience for both parties.

With that said, since I have been using InVision for 3 months now involving a few different projects, I have come across various features that simply could exist, that don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I do love the minimal, and simply functions of this app.

1) InVision allows only 1 view to be specified within one project. So a desktop view OR a mobile view, has to be selected. But what if there is 1 project that consists of a mobile and a desktop view. This makes it impossible to seamlessly share these within a unified project with a client.

2) wishing there was a status of a design or prototype that was for drafts, that have been reviewed, and are filled with feedback and comments that you wish to keep, without it clogging up “in progress, needs review, or completed” non of which apply to this very relevant category.

These are two glaring issues right now, but overall, like the software a lot. However at 14 / month, it’s pricy for very minimal features.

Since it’s inception this app has been a product that almost does what you wish it would.

Its Boards function doesn’t support many file formats and cannot handle bulk uploads. It has few layout formatting options and despite having been in existence for years has still not updated the customization of notes or text. Annotations on single images thread out replies in a single thread making it difficult to know which response is to what note.

If you happen to stumble upon a board link on a mobile device that is found elsewhere (say Slack or email) this app doesn’t recognize that you have their mobile app and by default points you to download it every single time. If you’re not added as an editor to each individual board, you’ll not see all your boards on InVision unless you previously commented on them because the mobile app doesn’t seem to know you’re the administrator of the entire team and have access by default.

this app has been this way for years. Actual years. Their products are ripe for disruption not because they’re poor ideas, but because they’re frail and incomplete and the company doesn’t appear to recognize this.

I’ve been using InVision paired with this app studio for several weeks now. At first, it seemed the answer to all our problems. Create a prototype in studio, add complex animations and transitions, and view them on InVision ! Everything worked great, and then I started seeing massive bugs like hotspots moving around, buttons moving to locations not specified as you navigate through animated screens etc. This means having to constantly “refresh” prototypes, including during user testing sessions. It has immense promise, and after trying 4-5 other tools like Figma is the only one that has this nice ability to easily animate and run prototypes of mobile apps (not websites). If they can fix the bugs my rating would go from a 1 to a 5, but for more complex prototyping it seems not quite ready for prime time.

With freehand. I’m getting decent results but some key and basic interactions are missing in order to be efficient. Things as simple as when tapping on a text box and the screen not pushing text to active area but sliding over the text box instead. I can’t move things back and forward in layers, and I can’t change color after I’ve made something.

The biggest frustration is the screen turning completely white every couple of minutes and giving me a 5 second panic that my progress has been lost and I have to back out of the freehand project and then back in in order to see my work again.

This has a lot of potential but I can’t trust the platform yet and that’s huge.

No landscape mode, yet Freehand requires a keyboard to actually accomplish basic functionality. You can’t copy elements nor can you draw straight lines. The ability to draw a shape and hold the pencil at the end to snap to a cleaner shape like in the web app is great, why no support for easily doing this with lines or shapes other than rectangles? Where is the quick undo? Where is the ability to delete a text block without having to manually delete every single character? Feels like I’m just using a straight port of the web version without any thought into the different hardware requirements or the opportunities that come from having a touch screen by default.

InVision is wonderful! It really ties the whole experience together between working on your computer and phone. The only problem is that with the most recent update, the mirroring feature displays in Apple’s new card-like modal view (iOS 13) instead of the original modal view (iOS 12 and below). This causes the mirrored view to be cut off at the bottom unless you scroll to reveal it. It doesn’t present a true view of what the design would look like on a phone.

-Mirroring doesn’t work.
-Prototype does its own thing, doesn’t care what you set home screen to, it just picks a random screen
-Studio is a hot mess of bugs and missing features. I just did a project through it and .. my god what a mess after years of dev. Often hotspots just don’t work. Try to imagine that presentation..
-There can’t be a UX designer on this app’s team because things like their website are laughably bad for a company that is centered around UI/UX. I can’t find things and they’ve violated nearly every heuristic and principle.
-Even this app doesn’t support Studio. Where’s Craft all these years later. Guarantee over half the people work there still design on Sketch first.

InVision has been getting better and better these past months, before it was almost unusable and horribly buggy. I’m now able to design and do the tests I need to do without being worried that InVision is gunna crash. Also the new Freehand addition is nice feature to sketch some ideas that come to mind. It’s still a bit pricey but happy to see improvements being made here. Keep it up!

1. this app doesn’t allow you to use browser if you’re on iPad.

2. In the iPad app the layout is terrible:
- comments are tiny and hard to read.
- scrolling and reading comments is hard because comment area is tiny
- switching between modes by tapping and holding screen takes forever.

3. Also some bugs: e.g. I don’t see the comment I type. I just type it, post it and only then I can see it.

4. Also: when I mention someone: I want to see people form this project FIRST. Not ALL the people from ALL projects. I have hundreds of projects in this app. And each project has from 3-5 members. Each time I want to mention a participant of this project I need to scroll through hundreds of my previous collaborators.

5. If you use slack and someone posts a link to this app and you’re on mobile device - you will never be able to open that link. First it sends to to AppStore, then it sends to to ALL projects in this app.

Terrible UX.

After finally getting an iPad Pro, I was pumped to use this app on the iPad. I could have my prototypes with me in meetings, take notes as comments remotely, and use Apple Pencil in Freehand!

But, InVision doesn’t even have landscape mode. I didn’t even know that was possible. Even writing this review I am trying to figure out what _I_ am doing wrong. Not having landscape mode makes InVision useless with a keyboard, and at least in my situation, that makes it pretty well useless always.

The solution would be to log in to the browser version, but I’ve never been able to log in to the browser version on an iPad.

InVision is worse than the website by a long shot. You can't even have it in landscape mode—it FORCES you to portrait...what is that about? It also crashes with any project that has too many screens. I deleted it so that I can go back to using the website. (Without uninstalling InVision you will be forced to InVision .)

Frankly I don't know how InVision has over 4 stars, it's simply not production ready. If it was an early stage beta I would understand.

The mirroring tool is really nice and I use that feature all the time.

But if I click into an existing prototype thumbnail and try to view page-by-page the experience is very poor. There is no way to navigate left or right, or even exit the full screen mode. I end up getting stuck on the first page and my only option is to quit InVision altogether.

Headed in the right direction, but I’m anxious for some sections to be rethought.

I really can’t say enough good things about this app. As a first time entrepreneur, IV really helped me take what was in my head and work through the process of how a user would actually interact with our app. It was so easy to pick up how to use this app and their help/support section is phenomenal for any questions that did arise. No joke, IV is legit! Use it. You won’t be sorry.

You can’t tap links to designs and view them in InVision

Commenting UI is bizarrely cramped

You can switch screens while in comment mode and it breaks commenting (lol)

App reliably crashes on a scroll through a 100+ screen design

Sessions are nuked every 15 minutes or something, if I’m using this I log in at least 5 times a day. Uses traditional web signin from this app, nothing like setting up face ID.

Can’t view activity

Can’t share individual screens

Bizarrely forces landscape viewing of screens in most recent release but portrait when you enter comment mode

Handles session expiry very, very badly. Projects disappear comments get eaten etc.

This is the worst quality app I use to get work done. I frequently have to resort to looking at the comp exports in Dropbox from my team instead of this app.

It’s also been... years. It’s been awful for years.

InVision and site is awesome. My one request is to provide an image assets folder. And allow mobile devices to upload and share images from photos library. I would love to make a sketch and upload it. Sometimes it’s hard to describe visual changes with text. Thanks for an awesome tool!

InVision is missing so many features compared to the full site that you get very little more than just viewing. No management features to delete projects (can only delete from device, not actual project) or see who it’s shared with (only standard phone sharing options). On top of that, you can’t access the full site at all from a mobile device (even if you try to force it by deleting the “m” in the url).

Overall a very bare bones MVP. Hurry up and improve!