Software is essential for visualization design processes. Since both designers and clients use this medium, choosing the right tool should be the first thing you do. This article will help you to learn more about software for Ux-design.
With so many software’s trading in the design and development sector, it might be a little tricky for a new designer to find the right match. In this article, we have created a detailed list of best software as per UX design.
Sketch
If you have any UI design experience, you’ve heard of Sketch. And there are quite a few reasons why it’s one of the design tools that’s so revered.
Being able to make universal changes — whether it’s through their library of symbols, layer styles, or text styles, or its smooth resizing and alignment features — saves designers time to deliver consistent prototypes. It takes out what’s tedious and lets designers jump in and create. And with a multitude of third-party plugins that integrate without problems, there’s no shortage of tools out there that can be used with Sketch.
Axure
Axure functions in prototyping and keeping track of the workflow. It features a smooth interface to document as you go. High fidelity drives this app, resulting in prototypes full of details.
Axure offers many of the other features of popular prototyping and UI design tools. It allows for testing of functionality and puts everything together for an easy developer handoff. This, combined with an emphasis on communication, ensures that everyone on a project is kept up-to-date with progress and changes as they happen in real time, making Axure a solid choice for UI design.
Proto.io
In their own words, Proto.io says using their UI design software results in “Prototypes that feel real.” And Proto.io delivers on this, giving you what you need to create, organize, integrate, and test accurate mockups. It also smooths out the collaboration process, fostering communication between team members through comments and video feedback, as well as integrating with some of the more well-known testing products, like Lookback, Userlytics, and Validately.
Marvel
Whether you’ve been a UI designer for a while or if you’re just stepping into the role, Marvel’s design platform makes things easy. With the ability to create both low fidelity and hi-fi wireframes, interactive prototypes, and do user testing, it gives a UI designer everything they need — all wrapped into an intuitive interface. Marvel also has a feature called Handoff that gives developers all the HTML code and CSS styles they need to start building.
Framer X
Framer X has evolved from its early days as a code-only prototyping application. Today it offers a host of UI design tools for building functional prototypes and testing for usability. Its ability to work with React makes it ideal for UI designers who like to stay on top of the newest web design innovations.
Framer X also offers a variety of plugins in their store, giving UI designers features such as UI kits for integrating social media channels like Snapchat and Twitter, players for embedding a variety of media, grids, and other useful components that can be easily integrated. It’s a great interface design tool with a fairly east learning curve.
Balsamiq
Balsamiq is an amazing wireframe tool that’s focused on low-fidelity.
Balsamiq has 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-fledged mock-up.
Availability: Web (cloud) / Windows / macOS
Pricing: Starts at $9/month
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.
Availability: Web
Pricing: Upon request
Maze
Maze
Maze is a powerful rapid testing platform that allows designers to run in-depth tests with or without prototypes, and to test and validate ideas, concepts, or copy.
The range of testing available is hugely valuable to designers working in every stage of the process. Deep user insights can be garnered from usability tests with open-ended follow-up questions, which brings designers and real users more closely aligned than ever. Meanwhile, actionable quantitative metrics from A/B tests, success rates, misclick rates, and page heatmaps can directly inform designers on a direction to take.
Maze offers broad integration options, tying in third-party prototyping and wireframing tools like Figma, Adobe XD, InVision, Marvel, and Sketch. Pairing Maze’s testing features with these UI design tools means that good design decisions are constantly being justified, while poor ideas are scrapped early on.
The software continues to be useful even before or after designers move from the prototype stage to creating the actual product. Running research surveys and gathering user feedback ensures that the product never strays too far from what users want or expect. Running on assumptions is never a good idea—as Gabriel Kirmaier of UX Bites says, “When we learn from the user, we make better products.”
Maze works on: Browsers
Pricing: Maze is free for individual projects, while paid plans are available at $25 per user/month
Adobe XD
Adobe XD
XD is Adobe’s UI design software, focused on creating product prototypes, mobile apps, and websites. It provides designers with the tools they need to create fully-fledged prototypes, including workflows, element creation, animated transitions, other dynamic elements, and more.
A benefit of using a tool from a suite as impressive as Adobe’s is that they, unsurprisingly, integrate perfectly with each other. And while tools like Photoshop, in particular, do reach the high end of pricing, larger companies will find the Creative Cloud package enticing, since many products are made available together, such as Illustrator and InDesign.
Adobe XD works on: Windows and macOS
Pricing: A free plan is available for single documents, with $9.99/month as starting plan price.
Conclusion
When it comes to UX and UI Design, and attempting to create and convey a message to the end user, the software you use becomes very important. Your software is your medium. And your talent, creativity and plan for what you want to convey should be able to be expressed with the right medium. Choosing the right software can help achieve that goal.