Eleven Powerful UX Tools To Make Your Life Easier
According to Thomas Carlyle, “man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he’s nothing, with tools he is all” — and I tend to agree.
Imagine walking in your office, sitting down and doing your daily UX routine without the use of any tools, just with the power of your mind. Impossible!
UX Tools have a life-changing impact on your professional life.
If you choose the wrong ones, your work — and fun at work — will suffer. Let’s take a deep dive.
How to choose the right UX Tool?
I found 4 key aspects that matter when choosing the right UX tool:
- Usefulness: How well does the tool solve your problem?
- Usability: Is the tool easy-to-use on a day-to-day basis?
- Collaboration: Is it easy to share your work with others?
- Integration: Are there integrations with other tools? Does it make the transition between design phases easy?
If you find a tool that exceeds your expectations in all of those 4 aspects — congratulations, never let it go!
You don’t live in a bubble.
Therefore, keep in mind that other colleagues will use your tool-kit.
You’ll have to show wireframes, prototypes, user flows and testing results to stakeholders on a regular basis.
Wireframing & Prototyping UX Design Tools
Amateurs often confuse Wireframes and Prototypes with each other.
Here’s a quick explanation:
Wireframes are low-fidelity, roughly sketched out frameworks of a digital product. A good wireframe has as little details as possible. Its purpose is to define the structure of the product.
Prototypes are high-fidelity and detailed representations of the final product. They are not coded yet, but you can click through them and already test it out on users.
Balsamiq
Balsamiq is an amazing wireframe tool that’s focused on low-fidelity.
Balsamiq has a consciously chosen a hand-drawn and cartoonist style of displaying elements. This takes the complexity out of the design and forces you to focus on the placement of elements. You won’t get the chance to “accidentally” create a full-fleshed mock-up.
Available on: Web (Cloud), Windows, macOS
Pricing: Starting at $9/month.
Adobe XD
XD is the flagship UX tool by Adobe.
The tool saw a great evolution in the last 3 years. Nowadays, it boasts a decent collaboration feature that allows you to share documents and work collaboratively. XD is a solid prototyping tool that allows you to create elements and animate transitions (micro-interactions) between them.
A big drawback as of today: You and your colleagues can’t simultaneously work on the same document.
Available on: Windows & macOS
Pricing: Paid plans start at 9.99$ per month, per user. XD has a generous free plan.
Figma
Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool.
The best thing about Figma is the ability to co-edit live with your colleagues. Besides that, the tool has a nice interface that allows inserting elements, animations, and code in order to create high-fidelity prototypes.
Available on: Windows & macOS. Figma also offers a mobile app to mirror prototypes.
Pricing: Starting at $12 per editor, per month
Sketch
Sketch is the OG of element-based digital design.
Its gain in market share was one of the reasons that Adobe released XD.
Sketch has a clean and easy-to-use interface that’ll make it easy for you to create nice looking mock-ups. Collaboration is an issue though — especially since Sketch is available on macOS only.
Available on: macOS only
Pricing: starting at $99/year
Usability Testing UX Tools
So you created an awesome prototype. Developers have started to work on it — and you’re ready to move on.
But wait — before you spend too much time coming up with new designs, validate your first ones by doing usability testing.
UserTesting
UserTesting wasn’t particularly creative when they came up with their company name, but the platform is great for finding suited candidates to test new designs on. You can talk with users while they engage with your work.
Available on: Web, Windows & macOS
Pricing: Upon Request
Applause
Applause is another platform to source usability testing participants.
As a premium player on the market, it takes a hands-on approach and provides you with a qualified UX expert to help you with your usability study.
Pricing: Upon Request
UXCam App Analytics
UXCam is a qualitative analytics solution for mobile apps that allows you to get a deep understanding of user behavior.
UXCam Session Recording capabilities allow you to easily see how real users navigate through your app.
Sessions can be easily shared, even with people outside your UXCam organization. The advanced filter system lets you to find useful sessions lightning fast.
Available on: Windows, macOS & Web. Dedicated to mobile apps only.
Pricing: Upon Request
Flowchart UX Tools
Mapping out and keeping track of your product flowchart, also known as user flow, is one of your core responsibilities as a UX Designer.
Therefore, the tools and strategies, like in chess, you use for it is crucial. You can use one of the above-mentioned UX tools for this, but they are hard to keep track of. Consider the options below!
Overflow
Overflow is a user flow solution that integrates with Sketch, Figma and XD. It lets you impact designs from those apps, add device skins and rearrange them. Then you can connect and annotate them.
Pricing: Starting at $15 per month, per person
FlowMapp
FlowMapp offers a low-fidelity, wireframe-style approach to mapping user flows. It allows you to build simple diagrams through shapes, lines and icons.
Pricing: Starting at $15 per month
UXCam Screen Flow
It’s always good to get a reality check. You might imagine that a user flows through your app in a certain way, but what is he actually doing? With UXCam’s Screen Flow feature, you can easily find out.
Available on: Windows, macOS & Browser. Dedicated to mobile apps only.
Pricing: Upon Request
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Are there any UX Tools that I missed? Let me know in the comments!
Originally published at https://uxcam.com.
