Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Shay Ho

After waiting for a while, I finally got a chance to review Invision Studio last week and I am now having some (okay, maybe more than some) thoughts about it.

For this, I made a shot for the Daily UI challenge, which I admit that I’ve abandoned for a while now.

Final result on my Dribbble

Currently Invision Studio is only on Mac and not available for everyone, there is a badge saying “early access” on the splash screen. Invision would send you a link to download if you’re on the waiting list. One of our front-enders received it and shared with me for a play around even though I’m sure I signed up before him.

In this post, I’ll try not the discuss the things I’ve seen everyone has mentioned, like Animation functionality, no plugins and version control yet (I’m very keen for this), but my own take on it, mostly compared to Sketch.

General differences compared to Sketch:

Duplicated layers and groups are not “Copy 1” on default but they have the same name.
The choice of not having a scroll bar on sub menus, such as Fonts, is odd to me.
There are fewer blending options but Copy and Paste Styles functionality is built-in, same as Photoshop, which is quite handy.
First impression of resizing groups from Sketch is better in my opinion.

Likes:

The learning curve is very minimal.
UI is pleasant-looking. There are Light and Dark UI built-in. I love the icons that Invision created for Studio.
V is shortcut for selector tool and Pen is P!!!! This is one of the things annoys me the most while using Sketch.
There is an option that you can see HEX codes in the Global or Documents colours.

Pages and Layers panels are separate and Layers panel seems to work smarter than Sketch’s. This should be handier when you work with a lot of different pages and screens. And for example, when you select multiple groups in the Layers panel, it doesn’t select the layers inside.
Stroke has more options.

Text boxes trim and fit better than Sketch without any plugins. I use Textbox Fit Content plugin in Sketch to achieve the same effects (sort of).
There is a ‘Move to Back/Front’ option!

Dislikes:

If you drag an image in to the working file, there’s no Shadow options. You also can’t have images in shape boxes, only through masks. And there’s no way to replace images quickly.
There’s no slide on data to change them for all of the parameters, e.g shadow options.
I can’t seem to find layout or grid options, only the default ones. And only after playing around for a bit, I found the options under View > Layout
Masks sometimes don’t work as expected. And when I had a mask created from a circle and tried add a stroke, Studio created a stroke around the rectangle border instead.
Font listing doesn’t have the looks of the fonts so unless you know how your font looks like, you need to view them by selecting one by one.

Other bugs:

I couldn’t duplicate artboards and pages at first after trying a few times and getting frustrated, I restarted the computer and it worked.
There’s some weird dots when moving objects.

Layers panel duplicates items on top of each other sometimes. And when I restarted the app, the layers are all mis-aligned. 😤😤😤

What the hell is this??!?!?!

Nice-to or should have:

The ability to collapse all groups.
Font that is just installed can be view immediately, not requiring restarting the app.
Where is ‘Round to pixels’?!?! 🤔
There’s no ruler (yet?).
Can we export Invision Studio videos to .mov? or gif? or better yet, code? Currently you can only export to Invision personal account, and not Enterprise.

Final verdict:

Invision Studio has a lot of hype still and Invision is super ambitious with what they want to achieve but Studio is not there yet. Maybe in 1–2 years, it can be very powerful industry-standard app but right now maybe they can slow their horses to have fewer functionalities but more solid less buggy app. I’m not switching from Sketch for now since I just recently switched and there are too many tools right now but I’m keeping my eyes opened.

Side note: I didn’t play much with the animation settings because the layers’ bug was too much for me to deal with so I quit after making some very simple ones like fade ins. Would like to hear about this from others.

Have you tried Invision Studio yet? Comment below your thoughts.

I’m a Vietnamese UX designer based in Sydney, Australia. More about me at https://www.shayho.com

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A(nother) review of Invision Studio was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A(nother) review of Invision Studio

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