InVision Looks Like a Web Designer’s Dream Come True
Creation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called InVision offers a framework to do so that looks easy, fast and like a real pleasure to use.
The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow, but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.
Sponsor
It looks like a lot of hot designers are already excited about the service and the company says it’s got thousands of signups already, despite getting very little press coverage in the week since it’s launched.
Trying to create a free account resulted in an error message each time I tried to do so, but my account was in fact being created and I got verification emails each time I tried. Otherwise it appeared to work really well and was very fast and easy to get started with. Check out the demo video below.
Building to Learn
As Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO (designers of Apple’s first mouse, Microsoft’s second, the Palm PDA and much more), told BoingBoing in an interview today, “Building to learn is a really important part of our approach – it’s the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users.”
A service like InVision seems likely to be useful in that kind of strategy.
InVision was created by Epicenter Consulting, an 8 year old firm in New York. There are already many app wireframing apps available on the market (see Balsamiq, MockFlow and iPlotz, for example) but InVision appears to be winning hearts early with its ease of use. Smashing Magazine’s Editor in Chief Vitaly Friedman called it “very promising.”
UX designer Rachel Anna Lehman said this morning that she’s excited to do some wireframes with InVision and then user testing of them using Silverback. That does sound like fun.
“You can do a similar thing in Fireworks, but this makes it a lot easier,” mobile UX designer Brianne Baker told me after looking at the service. “The service’s resources section is cool too, they offer links to various wireframe kits and UI kits all in one place. Of course it depends on your workflow, not everybody prototypes like this. But it looks pretty awesome.”
