Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Clark Valberg InVision V7

The last few months have been incredibly exciting for me, for the team at InVision and hopefully, for the design community that we’re so fortunate to call home. We unveiled a game-changing new screen design tool and shared it at events all over the world. We launched a content hub filled with insights and best practices from the world’s leading design thinkers. We’re preparing to release a design management tool that will help design teams everywhere maintain quality and consistency at scale like never before. And we’ve raised a new round of funding so we can continue to innovate at this same furious pace in the future.

In the course of these launches and announcements, we’ve spoken a lot about how the world of business is changing, and how important Digital Product Design has become to any company that wants to thrive in the digital age. Today, more than 3.5 million individuals and 40,000 businesses — including 80% of the Fortune 100 — turn to us to help them adapt to this transition and create digital products that their customers love. In short, we’re building a business that helps power the most creative teams and companies in the world, and it’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly.

This responsibility is the reason we are always searching for new ways to dialogue with our customers and our community. We want to understand what challenges you, what excites you, and what motivates you so that we can build the products you want, before you even know you want them. And today it’s the reason we’re announcing a complete rebuild and redesign of the entire InVision platform. Over the last two years, our product and engineering teams have been working tirelessly to essentially rebuild InVision from scratch. The new InVision — codename: V7 — runs on an entirely new code base and redefines what it means to collaborate across teams and stakeholders.

V7 was built to address what we recognized as an evolving trend in the world of Digital Product Design, namely, that the volume of new products being created is scaling along with the diversity of the teams building them. Design has evolved into a cross-functional discipline that touches everyone from engineering to marketing to the executive suite. Given this, our highest priority with V7 was to support this scale through performance, responsiveness, and accessibility for a wider variety of individuals than ever before.

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Here’s what else is coming in V7:

Up to 8x faster: The new InVision is built from the ground up for lightning-fast responsiveness and reliability at scale.
New unified design: V7 introduces a new universal design system to deliver a unified, consistent user experience throughout the platform.
Introducing Spaces: Spaces make it possible to organize all of your project-related documents into one centralized space. This includes InVision Prototypes, Boards, Freehands, as well as documents from the other tools your team may use.
Powerful sharing: We’ve taken sharing to the next level with the flexibility to distinguish roles and customize access across your projects.
Built for what’s next: V7 lays the foundation for the future of our platform, including tightly coupled integrations with Design Systems Manager and Studio.

Building V7 while simultaneously launching Studio and Design Systems Manager has been a labor of love, but it’s a reflection of the standard to which we hold ourselves in terms of constant innovation and a passion for our work that matches the industry we serve. I believe that it’s also a validation of our distributed work model. Freed from the limitations imposed by having an HQ in a tech hub, we’ve been able to scour the Earth for the most talented individuals. Today, I’m proud to say that through hiring and acquisitions, we have some of the best and brightest product and engineering talent on six continents and 24 countries. It’s because of this incredible team that we’re able to accomplish such feats of speed and innovation with our product roadmap. Every morning I wake up inspired to work with these people and to tackle such important problems.

The days in which designers’ sole purpose was to move pixels around and make things look pretty are long gone. For those of us who have been working in this industry for awhile, there are a few truths that are slowly becoming recognized as immutable. The line between design and business strategy no longer exists. Designers have as much, if not more, to offer the c-suite as the other way around. And the work they are doing is, quite literally, changing the world.

The launch of V7 is just one more step towards my personal mission of building InVision into a platform where a new kind of conversation happens. A place where designers can help shape the strategic direction of a business and share their vision with the rest of the organization. A place where beloved products are created, and that helps redefine what’s possible by continually pushing the boundaries of technological and experiential innovation. I hope that you will love using it as much as we have loved building it.

InVision V7 will be available in early 2018. To get early access, please sign up here.

Sneak Peek: A New InVision was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sneak Peek: A New InVision

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