Delivering exceptional customer experiences — in days versus weeks — with Sanity
Sanity’s single source of truth for content and data transforms content editing, design, and engineering at leading product design and development platform company.
Customized editing interfaces to empower content creators and reduce engineering time.
What used to take us two weeks in our previous CMS takes us a day or two in Sanity. Sanity plus the ability to leverage repeatable design patterns has completely transformed our ability to produce engaging customer experiences.
InVision is the leading product design and development platform for teams building world-class digital products. Their inclusive platform and services enable creative collaboration across teams and geographies for improved speed to market and powerful business results.
Landing page deployment went from 2 weeks to 1-2 days: an 86% improvement
Integrations and updates to the tech stack are quick and nearly effortless
Flexibility to start small and expand usage over time
More than 7 million people — and 100 percent of the Fortune 100 — use InVision to collaboratively design and develop products. Rather than treating customers as buyers, InVision focuses on helping them reach their goals using its platform. The company goes to great lengths, especially when it comes to customer-facing materials like landing pages.
The issue: generating compelling customer experiences was held back by a rigid, legacy CMS designed for blogs. The engineering team supporting customer content — everything up to the login screen — wanted a more flexible, scalable CMS. InVision tried altering its legacy CMS and making it “headless” by adding a custom JavaScript front-end, but that option was complicated, clunky, and wouldn’t scale.
“Our C-level executives expect us to launch engaging, customer-facing landing pages in a day or two and focus on content creation, not engineering,” says Brent Price, Director, Marketing Engineering at InVision. “We needed a solution that would scale quickly and put our designers and content managers in the driver’s seat.”
In its search for a new CMS, InVision found that Sanity provided extensive design flexibility, rapid scalability, and easy integration with other tools in the company’s tech stack. Sanity also provided ease of editing via its open-source content editor Sanity Studio, empowering content managers and editors to be self-sufficient when building content.
Adding to the advantages, Sanity treated InVision as a genuine partner, not just a customer. “Like us, Sanity takes the stance that each customer is valued,” says Jon Wheeler, Senior Product Marketing Engineer at InVision. “They came to us looking to create a real partnership that would help us achieve our goals.”
As a small group charged with supporting a large marketing organization, InVision’s Marketing Engineering team is responsible for the public-facing content platforms not directly tied to the product. With a lot on the line and a desire to make every customer experience shine, the team first wanted to start small and expand usage over time.
The engineers started with the company’s legal web pages. They quickly loaded the content into Sanity Studio, enabling legal experts at InVision to edit or update it as needed. At the outset, engineering received high praise for Sanity. From there, InVision has continued to expand its use of Sanity to modernize content deployment to all the sites powering company marketing.
Nearly two years into its implementation, the company continues to give Sanity rave reviews, both for its easy content-editing capabilities and for the engineering experience. One especially potent capability: content is stored as data in Sanity, providing a single source of truth and making it easy to convert any data object into components from the company’s design system that are accessible to content editors within Sanity Studio.
Integrations have been a breeze, whether it has involved Algolia for site search or Marketo for web forms. Sanity enables the engineering team to create a metadata layer that allows them to integrate or update software in the tech stack flexibly, with little development overhead.
“In implementing a CMS structure, you would be hard-pressed to find a better experience than Sanity,” says Price. “The Sanity technology, languages, and framework align closely with our infrastructure. Sanity is a big reason why we’ve been able to operate as a small team supporting a large marketing organization.”
The engineering team populates Sanity Studio with content and design elements, customized to each editor’s needs and responsibilities. This keeps the editor experience clean and relevant, enabling content managers to create at will, without engineering involvement.
“We see people take hold of Sanity and run with it. Most times, we never hear from them again,” says Wheeler. “We can get out of the way, so creators can focus on how they are contributing. People who hate CMSes because they feel constrained love Sanity — our designers don’t even realize they’re using a CMS.”
InVision is known for delivering engaging customer experiences, but the effort of creating beautiful landing pages used to take weeks. It now takes one to two days, even including custom URLs. In one instance during a kickoff call for a new product landing page, the team was sketching out the wireframes and design elements. Price logged into Sanity, got the landing page 90 percent done, and showed it to the team before the call ended.
“You should have seen the looks on their faces,” says Price. “They did not expect to get this far in a kickoff meeting. What used to take us two weeks in our previous CMS takes us a day or two in Sanity. Sanity plus the ability to leverage repeatable design patterns has completely transformed our ability to produce engaging customer experiences.”