Yesterday, the Invision team launched The New Invision, a collaborative workspace where you can unite your team and tools into one location. It sparked an interesting conversation: Do we need more tools that do it all?
“Why would a tradesperson use a hammer that’s tethered by string to a saw when there may be a better hammer out there?” posed commenter Simon Gabriel. Chris Messina also questioned the product thinking: “[H]ow do you avoid bloat while encouraging the production of best-in-breed product experiences?”
“Best-in-breed” is one cause for questioning. Invision is a popular tool used by independent designers and global corps alike, with 9 million users including 100% of Fortune 100 companies. The startup is a unicorn with $100 million in annual recurring revenue. No doubt: people may feel protective of what might be their favorite prototyping tool.
Another catalyst for debate – we’ve seen this a lot lately. Google, Monday.com, and Zoho are some of those consistently branching out to offer all-in-one collaboration. Is this update from Invision a moat to try and keep customers locked into one ecosystem, or something else?
Invision’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Olmstead, responded to ponderings (we’ve piece parts of responses together for a concise read):
“...I think we actually agree with you on this front. We see this more as a platform that brings unity to best-of-breed tools, not drives them apart. The key is for the system to get out of the way of [these] tools, not to try and eat them. That's our goal here.”
He also notes: “The paradigm shift here (for me at least) is the infinite canvas.” That infinite canvas is Freehand, working together with the new Spaces hub. Freehand is an Invision feature that has evolved from collaborative commenting to a robust whiteboarding tool over the last few years. Invision reported a 130% increase in Freehand’s weekly active users towards the start of the pandemic. It built out and improved on Freehand in response to a surge in new non-designer users.
Spaces adds a secure, single source of truth for projects, enabling teammates to easily organize and locate documents. Olmstead illustrated: “What would it do to my workflow if, instead of having a Google Doc, Google Sheet, design file, etc in separate tabs that I can only view one at a time, I had them in all in one place (one tab) as editable docs to work with lots of different types of stakeholders.”
The New Invision also introduces smart widgets (e.g. convert a sticky note into a live Jira ticket), deeper meeting integrations with Microsoft (Zoom on the way), collaborative presentations, and over 100 new templates.
All in all, we think the new features seem to match up with Olmstead’s perspective on bringing out the best of tools, versus certain tech giants that want to eat them all.
Are you team all-in-one?
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