Crafting the Studio user experience, chapter 1: a Conversation
👋 Hello, friend!
Let’s talk about what it means to have a Conversation through Design — and why it’s important to us all. We’ll talk about how we intend to bring our passion and philosophy to bear on bringing engineering and design closer. We’ll also talk about the Studio user experience.
We’re here to discover what design looks like together, with you.
“And I’d like to just continue to be able to express myself
As best as I can with this instrument
And I feel like I have a lot of work to do” *— DJ Shadow, Building Steam With a Grain of Salt
🌱 Turning design into a Conversation
This is what the InVision team loves doing. Helping you make that Conversation happen is why we exist.
How this started
At a point in the not-too-distant past, the Studio team began thinking hard about our continued purpose in your creative space. We were looking for what we want to be for you next year, the year after, and years into the future.
The Conversation you are already having
You’ve quickly tapped your friend on their shoulder for their opinion on whether you’ve chosen a color palette that really pops. ✔️
You’ve pinged a group of people for feedback on whether the team’s UX prototype is usable internationally and is accessible for every possible audience. ✔️
You’ve engaged a group of your most thoughtful colleagues for days of back and forth validation on whether the copy you’ve written asking people to share their most personal data is considerate and transparent. ✔️
This Conversation can be with yourself (as notes), your team, other teams, your machine (automated feedback, linting etc.), or other machines (machine learning powered improvements). It could also take any form. The broader tech and maker community has built wonderful tools for this, and your workflow as a maker deserves to leverage all of it.
And the one you could be having
We’ve decided to focus on ways to remove restrictions on what your Conversation looks like. We’ve chosen a greenfield approach: an extensible Studio Platform, where you pull in the language, tools, and processes you want for giving your creations useful meaning.
👩💻 The Studio user experience: a Platform for Conversations
You, the adventuring Studio user — are a maker.
Who you may be
You’re a designer pulling together prototypes. You’re a developer using mockups to create accurate screens. You’re a dreamer with an idea for an Alexa skill in their head, and have a need for any tool to just put it down somewhere before you lose the idea. You may be none of the above.
My own case could be both similar and dissimilar from yours. When I get a new machine, I get Firefox and install LastPass on it asap. When I get vscode, I also download Settings Sync. When I create a new community Slack instance, I set up /giphy. When I buy a phone off of Craigslist, I install Peek Launcher (after wiping and resetting). Everyone has their own unique combination of tools and workflow; what you chose gives you value.
Studio as a foundation
Studio is taking shape as a foundation that’s made to be built on. It comes with core functionality out-of-the-box but what is more valuable, in my Conversation, is its extensibility. That empowers us to take control of our workflow. It empowers us to use our imagination. As your workflow evolves, your Studio can evolve with you.
Your Apps as the user experience
The Studio user experience comes down to performance, integrity, and extensibility. We’re pouring a lot of time and effort into performance, mostly to make Studio get out of your way.
Studio is becoming extensible with Apps°. The combination of Apps that you install for your Studio experience can become the building blocks of your and your team’s personalized workflow.
Studio with Apps is a solution for a fragmented design process: a process where Designers have more to think about than executing visual design.
To solve everything from prototyping to developer handoff, designers often must find one-off tools for each specific need. Switching from tool to tool can mean wasteful, repetitive importing/exporting and workarounds. Studio is the workshop into which designers can install personalized tools for all their creative needs.
As Ben said in November, our DevRel team (and others) will be here to empower you. For the next few months, we’re focusing on our API and documentation. As developers, we value the long-term stability of our API. We also value documentation and a great onboarding experience as core tenets of maker-friendly tools.
We only have so much bandwidth, so we’re defining developer experience with our Early Access partners. Our Early Access development partners (you know who you are, and we love you!) are fantastic. They tell us what they need from the API and we direct our resources towards those features to get their creative tools out the door. The API lets you as a designer or a developer build Apps to supercharge your workflow and, even better, make that App available for other people to supercharge theirs too.
👩🎤 Engineering a design platform for the future
I’ve seen the Studio Platform project and team mature many times over, and I’m ridiculously excited about what’s coming early next year. It will be quite the journey for me going from side-loading Studio Apps by copying files into the application support directory on my local machine to actually being able to install Apps from a Store.
The Platform’s foundational principles
When you and I are waiting for a feature, we sometimes ask ourselves, “Why don’t they just ship this already?”
Studio is making big strides in a short time. But, we will always prioritize the developer experience of using the Platform and making an App over just getting something shipped. We feel strongly that the stability of our API and its roadmap contribute directly to developers being happy using it.
Our architectural decisions prioritize performance that will not compromise the Studio experience. Apps run in their own host process on the Studio Platform. The platform is designed to stay nimble as your users install your App and others to extend their workflow.
In the future, the Platform will be lazy-loading your Apps by watching for the moment when your user wants to use it before instantiating it. Your users may be using multiple Apps, but they won’t be wondering if your App is weighing down the overall Studio experience.
And your unleashed imagination
Apps have the potential to bring your existing ideas or brand new ones into the design workflow.
I’ve relied on writing code to solve problems like: scripts to automate repetitive testing flows, putting the user on correct onboarding pages based on the tasks they’ve completed previously, and so on. I’ve also relied on better processes to solve problems: getting other developers in on the automation so we can leverage our shared flows, implementing a convention around the onboarding process so we only need maintain one component. Often code and processes go hand in hand.
Let’s think about how the field of DevOps rewrote a broken Conversation. DevOps did something special for the creative process. They changed how we create products. They pulled Development and Operations closer together.
DevOps was built on a culture of close collaboration between teams that were previously siloed. Design+Development deserves this too. Passionate people proposed practices that evolved into conventions and tooling. And they found benefits aplenty — such as quicker ways to solve critical issues, better management of unplanned work. The effect of DevOps was even felt beyond their original scopes. The tooling for advanced CI/CD came to be used for other applications, such as Github’s use of it for education.
Show us how you add to your Conversation
We’re inspired by conversations that challenge traditions; those that rewrite the fundamentals in pursuit of a better ideal. As we’ve seen with DevOps, we imagine that could happen here. That…that would totally make my day.
In our space, we want to partner with the broader design and developer communities to pull them close together. We want to empower the Design-driven Developer.†
✏️ Play with Studio v1.0
You give people superpowers! Studio’s first general release landed not too long ago; give it a spin by downloading it from here.
The API will follow in 2019.◊ 🚀
Also, our support team is rad! Ping them with any feedback you want to share. I promise you’ll enjoy the conversation.
* From the track “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt” in the album “Endtroducing…..” (1996) by DJ Shadow
° ‘App’ is our moniker for ‘plugin’.
† A person, group, org, or team interested in the evolution of screen design, and how human/computer interfaces enrich our lives.
◊ The Platform is currently being developed and tested internally. It will be opened up to Early Access partners via the Maker Program. Need early access? Sign up for the Maker Program.
👉 Fantastic illustrations by Jack Daly!
