An excellent marketing film, an hour-long advertisement.
I usually do not attend any design meet-ups or creative mornings as many revolve around recruiting or kind of cultural marketing.
Do not get me wrong; I like marketing but only when done for the products that help users 🙂 I can not just put marketing in driving seat. That’s me.
In the documentary, I saw great minds talking about design. It was pleasing to see advocacy around diversity and most importantly an attempt to explain what design is, to new designers.
Do not fall in love with your craft but try and understand if your solution is helping users even if it not pleasing to you.
As a designer avoiding falling in love with work is something everyone should learn. I do not think the documentary was about that. Rather it was around how big businesses think of design and practice design. And how InVison is helping these big businesses to move fast.
Let’s take a moment and step back
Do you think, Uber was successful because of testing early prototypes (InVision’s strength), or Pinterest, Dropbox or Google? These businesses were/are successful because they spend time finding the real problem and an opportunity to scale and make money by creating an excellent business model.
And to understand the real issue or an opportunity; InVision is not enough. Rather it is not meant for that. InVision is intended to test solutions or test user perception. It saves development time by filtering out solutions.
The disruption
The business model usually disrupts the industry and not product. Look at Lyft and Uber, from product standpoint not that different, but it was Uber which found the business model that disrupts the taxi industry. The documentary completely ignores communicating the business aspect of disruption.
Understanding technology and business model is something a software product designers should learn to be successful in long run. InVision does not play in that domain, so documentary skipped this point. To develop understanding around technology and business one does not need InVision.
It was about pushing InVision in the workflow Simple 🙂
Who uses InVision? Primarily the designers.
Producing an artifact is one of the things designers do. Create a visual reference that helps in better communication. It could be a presentation, flow, wireframe, visual mockup or an illustration. Executing that artifact does not assist in becoming a better designer.
Sadly the documentary was focused on the execution part. And guess what, that’s where InVision helps. The documentary was trying to convince smaller companies or startups by showing how adding InVision in the workflow contributes to moving fast, which is the need of this hour.
To be a better designer an open mind with the willingness to listen and learn is needed .
Better designer = a reliable thinking partner
A partner who gathers ideas from product and engineering colleagues and weaves them together. To be a thinking partner designer do not need mockups, they need an open mind. Better designers HOST a conversation to check if the proposed solutions help users and if not how to improve.
I love InVison and use it when appropriate
But I refuse to accept that it will make me a better designer or is the ultimate tool. InVision helps to filter out bad design solutions, and that’s the role it plays in my workflow, which I sincerely agree is pretty big and do give credit to the InVision team.
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