In your opinion, what is the strength of IPS for its future?

[annadaa]

Personally I see its future and its strength in its admin panel, its ease of use, the addition of plugins with a minimum of bugs or rapid correction in the event of a problem interaction between them.

And especially in the core who are the members and exchange between them or in specific groups that it is something dedicated not external like for example word press with bbpress buddy press and plugins that never end.

I hope that this post is not made to talk about the shortcomings it could have but rather how can IPS respond in the near future to our needs corresponding to the needs of today's Internet users?

 

Thanks

[Chris Anderson]

Well, IPS has outlasted all but a few competitors.  While that has benefits, a little good old-fashioned competition is good for businesses as it often inspires employees to be ever more creative and to push themselves and their company as a whole to be just a little bit better year in and year out. 

Without competition businesses often become more and more complacent and more willing to accept the status quo.  There's a term in the startup world, the MVP or minimum viable product. 

Too often that becomes the norm for product release cycles and not for the early months while you are striving to make it big.  With no "real" competitors companies tend to release a string of "nice" features and never seem to stive to release only "great" ones.  They embrace quantity over quality.

Meeting you customer's needs is "fine", but delighting them?  That can really set a company apart and make them truly competitive in the marketplace, even against far larger competitors.

Instead of releasing a bunch of features one after another I would encourage looking more holistically at the product suite and release features that work together to better allow communities to interact more effectively and truly delight their membership. Release a feature once with all of the things one would want on day one not fill in the missing pieces over the course of many subsequent releases. Release a feature once (and be bug free) then move on. Repeat the process with the next feature.

That would be something I would like IPS to strive for in the future, doing so would put the last remaining competitors in their dust.

 

[Dreadknux]

Many people’s idea of what form a ‘community’ takes has changed significantly from the 2000s (and even 2010s). Invision Community started out as a humble forum software, but I think a good future for the platform would be to evolve towards something more familiar to today’s audience.

I think some progress has been made for sure, with Activity Feeds, Clubs and Status Updates bolting-on some level of ‘social media’ component to the platform. But it still feels like a Forum software that’s wearing a nice pair of Twitter-like shoes. It doesn’t yet feel like an all-in-one social media-like community platform that I feel like IPS is wanting it to be.

That’s not to say I want IPS to completely turn IC into Facebook or something. But there are learnings from ease-of-use, timeline feeds, profile pages etc that can be found from various social platforms that should be adopted (for example, an Invision Community member’s profile page doesn’t look all that fresh and interesting next to a Twitter user’s profile, especially when viewing on mobile where a user has to scroll through an entire sidebar of meta info before reaching any user content 😴 ).

Forums can - and should - still be a core component of the platform, but I think the time is right now to focus on the other apps and build a more holistic community solution - in particular, ***PAGES*** 😄. Re-conceptualising these apps and how they connect and work together to suit a more cohesive ‘social community’ platform is where I think IPS has its best shot of forging a great path for the future.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Dreadknux