What's New (and What's Next) in 17.2: Indigo Studio

Ken Rosen / Tuesday, November 14, 2017

We’ve just released a new version of Indigo Studio, and it makes code-free prototyping and usability testing easier than ever.

We aim to keep Indigo Studio in the sweet spot for design and development teams, adding power and sophistication for UX designers while making Indigo’s core capabilities ever simpler and easier to learn for non-UX professionals.

In this release, we’ve made major enhancements on both fronts:

For Designers

For visual designers, Indigo Studio now fully integrates with Sketch, the design tool of choice for most UX professionals. Using our new Export to Indigo Plug-In for Sketch, you can export your designs directly from Sketch into Indigo Studio, where you can bring them to life and transform them into a fully interactive and testable prototype.

The Export to Indigo plug-in does more than just export, though—it also allows you to revise and update your visual assets and replace them within your Indigo project without tampering with the interactions, animations, and other elements you added.

Now you can have the best of both worlds—use Sketch for your visual designs, Indigo Studio for your interactive prototyping, and move back and forth between them as often as you like!

See our Sketch-specific blog post for more info and tips on how to get the best better-together experience with Sketch and Indigo Studio.

For Everyone

Our primary goal for this release was to make Indigo Studio even more intuitive and easy to learn. We’ve had a big library of documentation, lessons, and videos for quite some time, but we know that too much of a good thing can be overwhelming.

So for this release, we created, culled, and curated a set of brief, to-the-point, how-to tutorials and help document and created a prominent help and learning center directly in the product—no more combing our site to find the answers you need.

We also took one of your favorite but most hidden features—remote usability testing with video replays—and made it prominent and accessible within Indigo Studio itself. (Previously, you’d have to first share your prototype and then go to indigodesigned.com to find the usability study feature.) …and we’ve made it easier to apply animations by providing fade, slide, flip and pop presets that you can apply to UI elements on any state.

If you look closely, you may find other UI improvements designed to make Indigo Studio even easier to learn and use. But honestly, we hope you don’t—we tried to keep them subtle, natural and unobtrusive.

Indigo has always had a “there when you need us, out-of-the-way when you don’t” philosophy, and we try to maintain that. …and of course, we’ve included a customary collection of what we call “little big things,” including:

  • Linea icon pack
  • Sharper display for Mac users
  • Performance improvements when working with large prototypes
  • New Project Home sort and view options
  • New Drag keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Drag/Cmd-Drag)
  • …and more.

You can always view our detailed change log to get the full list of changes.We update Indigo Studio almost every month, so it’s worth checking periodically.

For the Enterprise

This release also marks the debut of a new member of the Indigo family: Indigo On-Prem. 

Indigo On-Prem provides the entire Indigo Studio Enterprise experience in a private network environment. No cloud required—Indigo On-Prem is powered by our new Indigo Server instead of our public indigodesigned.com platform. 

Use Indigo Studio On-Prem and Indigo Server to collaborate securely within your corporate firewall. Indigo Studio On-Prem is not included as part of Infragistics Ultimate.

Indigo On-Prem is powerful, secure, easy to set up, and integrated with your LDAP-based network directory. Check out our blog article to learn more about it.

What’s Next

No resting for us—we’re already hard at work on our next major release, coming in early 2018. With our next release, we’ll continue our focus on ensuring that Indigo Studio handshakes with the tools and processes you use today.

Our “big rock” features include a powerful new web-based experience for screen-based prototyping, project/issue-tracking tool integration, and new and enhanced control elements.

Stay tuned here for more information over the coming months. In the meantime, check out the latest version of Indigo Studio Essential. It’s still free, and it still includes 30 days of free access to all Indigo Studio Professional features. (Even if you’ve tried Indigo in the past, you can start a new trial with this release!)

Let us know what you think—we’d love to hear from you!

Want to learn more about Indigo Studio?

Indigo Studio empowers designers, developers, product managers and users to quickly and collaboratively create and test realistic prototypes – before the first line of code is written.

  • Visit our learning library for getting started videos and help documentation.
  • Don't have Indigo Studio yet? Download Indigo Studio Essential, which includes all of the Professional features free for you to try for 30-day. After 30 days, if you do not subscribe to Indigo Studio Professional or Enterprise, you will lose access to subscription-based features, but you can continue to use Indigo Studio Essential free of charge. Compare plans to see features not available in Indigo Studio Essential.