What is InVision? The Story of the Prototyping Pioneer & Its Legacy

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December 12, 2025

What is InVision? The Story of the Prototyping Pioneer & Its Legacy

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For over a decade, the InVision design tool stood as a pioneering solution to this very problem, empowering teams to create, collaborate, and bring their ideas to life with unprecedented ease. But what is InVision, and how did a platform once valued at nearly $2 billion become a case study in industry disruption? This comprehensive guide delves into the complete story of InVision UX design tool—from its meteoric rise as an essential partner for UI/UX services worldwide to the pivotal market shifts that led to its eventual sunset, offering key lessons for designers, developers, and businesses alike.

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What is InVision?

InVision was a cloud-based prototyping and collaboration platform that allowed designers to transform static screens from tools like Sketch and Photoshop into interactive, clickable prototypes that felt like a real application or website. It wasn’t a tool for creating the initial visual designs; instead, it was the stage where those designs came to life for stakeholders, developers, and user testing.

The History

The history of InVision is a classic tale of perfect timing and identifying a critical market gap. Founded in 2011 by Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel, the company emerged as the tech industry was placing a new, intense focus on user experience (UX). Designers had powerful tools for creating pixel-perfect mockups, but they were stuck presenting them as PDFs or image slideshows, struggling to communicate how the final product would actually work and feel. InVision solved this by allowing designers to simply upload their screens and define “hotspots” that linked them together, creating a seamless flow. This simple yet powerful proposition fueled incredible growth, making the InVision tool for UX design an industry standard and a cornerstone of modern UI/UX services by the mid-2010s. It became a “unicorn” startup, reaching a peak valuation of $1.9 billion and boasting a client list that included giants like Amazon, Netflix, and Uber.

However, this story has a pivotal turning point. Despite its early dominance, InVision announced it would be discontinuing all its services by the end of 2024. The reasons for its shutdown are a crucial part of its history, serving as a key lesson in tech industry disruption. Its decline was not instantaneous but the result of a fundamental shift in the market landscape, primarily triggered by the rise of Figma. Figma introduced a revolutionary all-in-one, web-based model where design, prototyping, and collaboration happened seamlessly in a single place, in real-time—akin to Google Docs for design. This made InVision’s workflow, which required constant switching between a design tool like Sketch and the InVision prototype, feel fragmented and inefficient overnight.

Furthermore, InVision faced significant internal challenges. As the company scaled, it encountered complex technical debt. It was reported that their initial microservices architecture became unsustainable, forcing a difficult and time-consuming consolidation back into a more monolithic structure, which slowed down their ability to innovate and compete with the agile development of rivals. They also struggled to transition from being a best-in-class prototyping tool to a comprehensive platform. While they launched their own design application, InVision Studio, and a Design System Manager (DSM), these products failed to gain significant market share against the deeply integrated ecosystem that Figma offered. The combination of this powerful external competition and internal strategic hurdles ultimately led to the decision to wind down the platform, marking the end of an era for a tool that once defined modern design collaboration.

What You Can Do with InVision?

The InVision design tool was much more than a simple prototyping utility; it was a comprehensive platform built to streamline the entire design collaboration workflow. Its suite of features addressed the key pain points faced by distributed teams and agencies providing IT outsourcing services, ensuring that everyone from a designer in one country to a client in another could stay perfectly aligned. The platform’s capabilities were broadly centered around bringing static designs to life and fostering seamless communication.

Interactive Prototyping and User Testing

The core of the InVision UX design tool was its powerful yet intuitive prototyping engine. Designers could upload their static screens and quickly create complex, interactive simulations by defining clickable areas that navigated to other screens with various transitions and gestures. This functionality was revolutionary for user testing, as it allowed teams to validate user flows, identify usability issues, and demonstrate the intended experience to stakeholders long before a single line of code was written. It turned abstract concepts into tangible experiences that anyone could understand and interact with.

Design Collaboration and Feedback

InVision excelled as a central hub for feedback and iteration. Its collaboration features allowed team members, clients, and stakeholders to leave specific, contextual comments directly on the prototype. This eliminated the chaotic back-and-forth of email threads and marked-up PDFs, creating a single source of truth for all design feedback. Version history ensured that no iteration was ever lost, making it an invaluable tool for managing the design process, especially for agencies delivering UI/UX services to multiple clients simultaneously.

Design System Management (DSM)

Recognizing the growing need for consistency and efficiency at scale, InVision introduced its Design System Manager (DSM). This feature allowed organizations to create centralized, living libraries of UI components, design patterns, and brand guidelines. Teams could publish updates to their design system, and those changes would be automatically synced across all connected prototypes and projects. While a step in the right direction, DSM faced stiff competition from more natively integrated systems in other platforms.

UX/UI Design Process with InVision

The traditional design workflow with InVision represented a specific era in digital product creation—one defined by specialized tools working in concert. This process was widely adopted by countless teams and became the blueprint for modern UI/UX services. It typically unfolded in a series of distinct, interconnected stages, beginning with asset creation and culminating in a detailed handoff to development:

Designers create the visual interface using dedicated design tools such as Sketch or Adobe XD.
Static design screens are uploaded to the InVision platform.
Interactive hotspots are added to define user flows, from simple actions like login to complex multi step processes such as checkout.
The interactive prototype becomes the central artifact for review and usability testing.
Prototypes are shared via a single link with team members, stakeholders, and users to collect collaborative feedback and validate design decisions.
Developers use the Inspect feature to access exact measurements, design assets, and code snippets, ensuring accurate translation from design to functional code.

Advantage and Disadvantage

When evaluating the InVision tool for UX design, it’s clear that its strengths were what propelled it to industry dominance, while its weaknesses ultimately left it vulnerable to disruption. The platform was a product of its time, perfectly suited to the workflows of the 2010s but unable to adapt to the paradigm shift that was coming. Its value proposition was powerful, but it contained inherent limitations that new competitors would successfully exploit.

Advantages

Streamlined Prototyping Workflow

InVision’s greatest strength was its simplicity. The process of uploading screens and creating interactions was incredibly intuitive, allowing designers to build sophisticated prototypes without any coding knowledge. This dramatically sped up the design iteration cycle and improved communication.

Powerful Collaboration Features

The platform was built for teamwork. Its robust commenting system, version history, and easy sharing made it an ideal collaboration hub for both co-located and distributed teams, including those leveraging IT outsourcing services. It brought clarity and structure to the often-messy process of gathering and implementing feedback.

Enterprise-Grade Security and Management

For large organizations, InVision offered the security, administrative controls, and single sign-on (SSO) integrations necessary to meet strict IT and compliance standards. This enterprise focus helped it secure and maintain major corporate accounts.

Disadvantages

The Fragmented Workflow

The most significant drawback was the inherent disconnect between design and prototyping. Designers had to constantly switch between their design software (e.g., Sketch) and InVision, a context-switching that introduced friction and inefficiency into the creative process.

Limited Native Design Capabilities

While InVision eventually launched InVision Studio to compete as a full-fledged design tool, it never gained enough traction to challenge the established leaders or the rising threat of Figma. It remained, in the minds of most users, a separate prototyping tool.

Performance and Scalability

As projects grew in size and complexity, users often reported that InVision prototypes could become slow and cumbersome to manage. This performance bottleneck highlighted the challenges of a platform that was not built as a unified, web-native application from the ground up.

FAQs

Do people still use InVision?

Following the announcement that its services will be fully discontinued in December 2024, active usage of InVision has plummeted. The vast majority of the design community and enterprise teams have already completed their migration to other platforms, with Figma being the primary beneficiary. While some legacy projects might still be accessible during the wind-down period, InVision is no longer a tool chosen for new work.

Why did InVision fail?

InVision’s decline wasn’t due to a single failure but a combination of market and strategic factors. The primary reason was the disruptive rise of Figma, which introduced a browser-based, all-in-one model with real-time collaboration that made the segmented workflow of InVision and Sketch feel instantly outdated. Furthermore, InVision faced significant internal technical challenges; reports revealed that its complex microservices architecture became unsustainable, forcing a difficult and time-consuming consolidation that slowed innovation. Finally, the market simply shifted towards unified platforms, and InVision’s separate paid products, like DSM, created friction that Figma‘s integrated approach seamlessly eliminated.

Is InVision the same as Figma?

No, they are fundamentally different. InVision is a tool for UX design prototyping and collaboration that requires other software to create the initial designs. Figma, in contrast, is an all-in-one platform where design creation, prototyping, collaboration, and handoff all happen natively within a single, web-based environment. Figma’s real-time, multi-user collaboration (like Google Docs for design) represented a generational leap over InVision’s comment-based feedback system, making the design process significantly more dynamic and integrated.

Is InVision easy to learn?

Yes, one of InVision’s key advantages was its gentle learning curve, especially for its core prototyping features. Designers could become proficient in creating basic interactive prototypes very quickly. Its intuitive interface and straightforward sharing model also made it easy for non-designers, such as clients and stakeholders, to participate in the review process without any training. However, mastering more advanced capabilities like DSM required a more significant investment of time and effort.

Final Thought

The story of InVision is more than the rise and fall of a design platform. It is a case study in how innovation reshapes industries and how quickly the standards for digital collaboration can evolve. For many years, the InVision design tool transformed the way teams communicated ideas, validated concepts, and delivered better digital experiences. It raised expectations for UI UX services and proved that interactive prototyping was no longer optional but essential to building successful digital products.

At the same time, InVision’s journey is a clear reminder that leadership in technology is never permanent. As the design ecosystem shifted toward fully integrated, real time collaboration, the market embraced new models that better matched how modern teams work. For businesses, the lesson is not about tools alone, but about adaptability — continuously reassessing platforms, workflows, and partners to stay aligned with an ever changing digital landscape.

This is where experienced technology partners make the difference. At Newwave Solutions, we help businesses apply the lessons of tools like InVision by delivering end to end UI UX design, product development, and custom software solutions built for today’s collaborative, fast moving environments. With our development and design teams based in Vietnam, we support global clients in choosing the right technologies, modernizing workflows, and creating digital products that remain resilient as the market evolves.

The legacy of InVision lives on in the higher standards it set for collaboration and experience design. Newwave Solutions helps businesses build on that foundation — turning proven design principles into scalable, future ready digital products.

To Quang Duy is the CEO of Newwave Solutions, a leading Vietnamese software company. He is recognized as a standout technology consultant. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.