App Design: Collaborating with InVision

When it comes to custom app design, InVision is a tool we can’t live without. This design collaboration and prototyping tool is awesome, and it offers two critical features that we encourage all of our app design clients to take advantage of: Commenting and Usability Testing.

Commenting to Share App Design Feedback

InVision’s commenting feature makes sharing feedback about your app design very easy. To enter comment mode, click the little on/off slider at the bottom right of the screen. Then you can tap on any spot on the page to leave a comment about it, which will look like this:

You can leave multiple comments per page, so it’s easy to share feedback about different areas of the same screen.

Usability Testing with Prototypes

Once we put the app design in InVision, then we link all of the navigation together so the buttons and gestures work like they would in the fully developed app. Even mobile gestures like swiping to the left or right, double tapping, and swiping up or down work just like they would in a real mobile app.

If your design is for a website or web app, then you’ll be able to use the prototype through any web browser to test the user experience. If you have a mobile app design, then you’ll want to take advantage of a very cool ability: you can send the prototype to your phone and experience what it will be like as a real app on a mobile device.

Depending on which display mode you’re in, you’ll either click the mobile phone icon or a “Share” button at the bottom right of the screen. Then enter your phone number to receive a text message with a link that will allow you to test the prototype on your phone.

Other Notable Features
InVision has several other great features that you might want to try, too:

• User Reaction Testing: For iPhone app designs, you can see and hear users’ feedback while they try the prototype. You can capture their screen as well as audio and video reactions. We hope this feature comes to Android soon!
• Real-time Revisions: InVision connects to our source files, so if you want to watch revisions happen in real-time while our app designers work their magic, go right ahead.
• LiveShare: awesome for conference calls, we can use LiveShare to view and modify screens in real-time together. You can show others on the call what you’re pointing at, sketch on the screen to visually describe an idea to others, add text in a specific area, plus other cool options to facilitate design collaboration.
• History: if you want to view every version of a screen’s design leading up to the current one, it’s all there.
• Embed: if you want to embed the app prototype on your website to show visitors what you have under development, InVision makes that super easy. It’ll be just like the prototype below:

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