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Phase Beta — { Interactions Come To Life }

over 4 years ago from , Co-Founder @ Phase

Phase Beta — { Interactions Come To Life }

Hey friends! We’d recently started manually onboarding first Phase beta-v1 users.

By now, more than 70 designers tried prototyping interactions in Phase. Thanks to those early adopters, we can now move much faster making Phase better.

It’ll take us some time to get it solid. We still have a lot to improve. Quite a few bugs to squash (especially importing), and few features we need to add to make it fully usable.

We’ll keep at it. Working with early beta users for the following few weeks, before eventually releasing a more-stable beta to the full early access list.

We’re building Phase out in the open, transparently and hand-in-hand with the designer community, so want to pass thank you’s to those of you helping us shape the future of Phase.

All are welcome to follow updates in #beta-testing on Phase Community.

Have any questions, or want to check the status? You can always shoot us a message.

Thank you, Vlad from Phase Team

19 comments

  • Jrtorrents Dorman , over 4 years ago

    The thing is, if you want a powerful and a more versatile tool, it’s going to get complicated no matter how they try.

    Think of Aftereffects vs iMovie.

    4 points
  • Simen BrurbergSimen Brurberg, over 4 years ago

    This design tools need some design(UI) touch, looks old and very outdated.

    3 points
  • Emily E, over 4 years ago

    I'm confused by everyone's comments talking about how cluttered the UI is. It is a multipurpose tool, it must have functions accessible to let you do the variety of tasks it provides. I bet there is the ability to collapse panels you are not using, like every other design tool.

    You can judge it visually, but what really matters is how easy it is to use, and how it fits into your workflow. You can't judge the performance of a design tool from screenshots.

    2 points
    • Greg Warner, over 4 years ago

      Agreed. I can't see how this looks overly complicated, and I definitely won't judge it until I give it for a full spin. I'll say again what I've written elsewhere—as pros we should not demand consumer-level simplicity from professional tools. UI complexity is not inherently bad or bloat. It's all about workflow efficiency and effectiveness to reach a good result with the proper fidelity to the project at hand. If you want true complexity, try a 3D rendering tool!

      1 point
    • Ali Zendaki, over 4 years ago

      I am not complaining about the amount of features crammed into the application window -- more so how they are visually designed on the style layer. Too many boxes and contrast issues that lead your eye away from the canvas. It's just a bit 'busy'.

      0 points
  • Ali Zendaki, over 4 years ago

    The UI is too noisy/has too much contrast. They just need to dial back some of the nuances.

    1 point
    • Daniel MarcinkowskiDaniel Marcinkowski, over 4 years ago

      Hey Ali, thanks for the feedback! You are right – the UI needs some work. Before Phase v1 is out we are going to change it a lot :)

      0 points
  • Ca. X., over 4 years ago

    I don't get it.

    How is different to the other 20 tools out there?

    1 point
    • Robin GoyalRobin Goyal, over 4 years ago

      Trying to understand that too. xD

      0 points
    • Jrtorrents Dorman , over 4 years ago

      On the fly one.

      Ability to do multiple interactions on a single artboard! Say you want a button that turns from a square to rectangle on click. (just an example)

      With most prototyping tools (Invision/Principle/Flinto etc) you need multiple screens to achieve this, in Phase you can do all in one artboard.

      Check out the medium post they shared, they’re doing a ton of things differently from the current design tool landscape. My only worry is if they’ll be able to pull it off.

      0 points
      • adrian ioadrian io, over 4 years ago

        With Axure or Framer you can already do that and you can do more complicated stuff.

        0 points
        • Jrtorrents Dorman , over 4 years ago

          Axure is a bloated piece of software.. Framer has a steep learning curve (which they’re fixing with Framer X).

          But then again I said “most”. I didn’t mean no other tool has this functionality.

          0 points
          • adrian ioadrian io, over 4 years ago

            What is bloated about Axure?

            It has a lot of features, because it's the one tool which allows you to create simple prototypes ala invision etc

            And it allows you to create pretty complex prototypes with real input forms (which you need to prototype enterprise apps) and conditionals.

            Framer is great to create high fidelity prototypes and yes you're right there is a learning curve.

            0 points
            • Jrtorrents Dorman , over 4 years ago

              its slow and buggy at least from my last experience.

              0 points
              • adrian ioadrian io, over 4 years ago

                Been using it for years - can't remember it ever crashing, maybe once or twice, but it has auto-save, so you can recover from a previous version.

                And the UI is pretty snappy as well - even with coimplex screens.

                And I have my prototypes locally on my laptop - pretty handy when doing client workshops where you don't have access to the WiFi or where it's slow.

                And more importantly, you get proper form fields, which you can type into. With invision and friends you can't do that.

                Granted it doesn'l look as fancy as the other tools - but professionals want power and efficiency and not pretty...

                0 points
                • Jrtorrents Dorman , over 4 years ago

                  I had a completely different experience, matter of fact one of colleagues threatened to quit his job if he was forced to use it. There’s a reason it’s not been making any waves in the design community.

                  0 points
                  • adrian ioadrian io, over 4 years ago

                    I think it's because Axure at first look appears to have a slightly steeper learning curve vs Invision.

                    Axure is really well suited if you need to prototype more than clickable hot-spotted images with nice transitions.

                    If you work on enterprise desktop web apps and need to quickly prototype interactive datagrids, forms etc - good luck doing that with Invision and other similar tools.

                    If you don't need that level of fideliy or if your focus is more on mobile apps, then Invision etc will do.

                    Axure 9 is coming out this year I think and it has more performance improvements, copy from Sketch and other things.

                    https://www.axure.com/blog/new-in-9

                    0 points
      • Amos Gyamfi, over 4 years ago

        Kite: https://kiteapp.co/tutorials does that with a single artboard.

        0 points