“If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings”—David & Tom Kelley.
These lines ring true, especially in the competitive world that we live in. Why?
Intuitive and user-friendly websites and apps don’t happen with a swish of a magical wand. It’s a result of rapid iterations and testing that make an app or website user-friendly.
The journey of building a revolutionary product and answering the pain points of your target audience is overly complex. Brands that don’t use the right tools to build intuitive designs may commit the same mistake as Google Wave. Though this project was interesting, it failed to create rippling effects like other Google products due to the wrong product design. As a result, it was closed within one year of inception.
With so much on the table, UI/UX design teams have little room for error. That’s why these professionals focus on UI/UX design tools to put an end to all their design-related misery.
In this article, we explore some must-have design tools in your tech stack.
Top 5 UI/UX Design Tools in 2021
Here are five UI/UX design tools to consider for creating a successful product design in 2021.
1. Maze
For brands looking to redefine a product design that enhances user’s experience, we cannot move ahead without talking about Maze. It’s one of the best UI design tools on our list because it lets you test run and validates ideas before fully implementing them.
Before any product launch, you can try and test various stages of your product design. This design tool is your one-stop destination because it provides designers with what they require to create designs that customers cannot overlook–data.
For this reason, designers who specialize in data-driven designs prefer using Maze over other UI design tools. Interestingly, it collaborates with real users and turns prototypes into actionable insights.
What’s more interesting is that Maze allows you to run tests with or without a prototype, giving you much-required flexibility.
Unlike other design tools on our list, Maze is an excellent platform for curating feedback. It gives a detailed analysis of the success rate and time it takes to carry out each test. Once a user completes their test, Maze opens a dashboard that provides an overview of all user actions during the test.
Also, as users can provide feedback and comments, it helps your design team execute flawless product designs.
Key highlight: Maze lets you perform testing during your design phase and even afterward.
Integration: Integrates with some topmost wireframing and prototype tools like Marvel, Sketch, Figma, Invision, and others.
Pricing: Free for individual projects, and their paid plan starts at $25 per user per month.
2. Invision
Not only does Invision allow a business to create interactive prototypes, but it also helps you present the prototypes as a final product for your client. This workflow platform gives special emphasis on real-time comments and to-do lists to make collaboration seamless.
Using Boards, team members can share suggestions and provide feedback that helps build a product that resonates with the audience and increases team dynamics. Interestingly, this collaborative option enables UI/UX developers to publish their work as they build and allows them to make documented changes at every stage of the design process.
Without giving a second, you use Invision to present your work to business stakeholders and clients.
From streamlining design workflows to prototyping products before writing the code, Invision is a tool that offers a bunch of advantages. However, it’s not a standalone tool because you will have to import images from Photoshop or Sketch.
What’s more interesting is that Invision allows you to create and design interactive mock-ups for your wireframes and design projects.
Key highlight: Invision lets bring your principles, code, and components together in a single centralized place.
Integration: Integrates with other popular SaaS tools like Slack, Jira, and Sketch.
Pricing: Free for individual and small teams, and their paid plan starts at $7.95 per user per month.
3. Adobe XD
There is no better choice for businesses looking for a vector-based design tool for their desktop computer users than Adobe XD.
This masterful tool lets designers create designs as they imagined.
From allowing collaboration across teams to getting real-time feedback to creating prototypes, this tool puts website, mobile apps, and product design at the forefront. As a brainchild of a tech giant like Adobe, most digital designers will find this tool easy to use. It provides the functionalities of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop minus all the bloating.
Though it may appear as a light and basic UI design tool, Adobe XD’s interface can easily handle intricate and complex designs.
To make the tool attractive for designers, Adobe is marketing it as a “product of designers from designers,” and they’re faithfully sticking to it. It’s a tool that a designer will never regret using.
Key highlight: Adobe XD allows you to create 3D and reusable designs that eliminate recreating efforts.
Integration: Integrates with different plugins and apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zeplin, Jira, Dropbox, and more.
Pricing: Their paid plan starts at $9.99 per month.
4. Sketch
An intuitive and user-friendly interface and easy collaboration are two things that perfectly define Sketch. Like Adobe XD, Sketch is also a vector-based tool, meaning you don’t have to worry about screen resolution or densities for creating logos, visual mock-ups, and layouts.
From designing professional logos to prototyping and wireframing, it’s a tool that helps UI/UX designers accomplish all their tasks efficiently. With pixel precision editing functionality and speedy workflow makes Sketch a preferred choice for many designers.
It empowers designers to edit the styling of a product design, create design layouts and use different blending modes to create a functional yet visually appealing design.
As it’s a lightweight tool with a user-friendly interface, it allows designers to focus on the task at hand instead of spending hours learning and exploring different features.
What’s more interesting is that Sketch allows you a seamless transition between design screens and helps you create prototypes with a few clicks. Using the cloud interface, designers can get immediate feedback from team members. This reduces the product’s time to market while ensuring a design that customers cannot overlook.
Key highlight: Unlike others on this list, Sketch allows device mirroring that helps designers to mirror a design on different devices to understand how they will look.
Integration: Integrates with different plugins and apps like Maze, Zeplin, Overlay, Flinto, and Abstract, among others
Pricing: Their paid plan starts at $9 per editor per month.
5. Figma
Unlike Adobe XD and Sketch, Figma is a browser-based designing and prototyping tool widely used by UI/UX designers. Boasting a full-fledged product design tool allows designers to add animated transitions to their product design, and facilitates prototyping and illustration.
With Figma, you can combine layers, scale design, use vectors, use Boolean operations and test different design aspects.
The web-based functionality and real-time collaboration with different teams make Figma outsmart competitors. As it’s a cloud-based tool, your work is automatically saved, and you never have to worry about losing a version or a draft of your product design.
Using FigJam, which is an online whiteboard, a design team can brainstorm and ideate together. As FigJam and Figma are next-door neighbors, UI/UX designers can use FigJam to create product designs that are in line and consistent with your brand.
An extensive plugin library is another feature that makes Figma a leading choice among UI/UX designers looking to impact their designs. Unlike Sketch, which is a Mac-only tool, you can use Figma on Windows as well.
Key highlights: Figma connects each team member in the design process so that teams can
deliver high-quality products on time.
Integration: Integrates with Maze, Zeplin, and Confluence
Pricing: Offers a free starter pack with paid plan starting at $12 per editor per month.
Choosing the best UI/UX design tool
With 73% of businesses willing to spend on design to help their brand outclass their digital competition, brands that focus on investing in design tools are the ones that will match the customer’s expectations.
As a designer works on creating designs as per the client’s requirement, many things can go wrong. To prevent these roadblocks from delaying a product or website launch, designers often turn towards UI/UX design tools.
These five tools mentioned above are likely to help you achieve your design goals. While all these tools offer some unique feature or the other, choose one based on your technical requirement and financial capacity.
As most of these tools offer a free trial to some extent, you can use them for a trial period to make an informed decision. If you ask us, our favorite is Maze due to obvious reasons. Though it’s a little costly than others, the features it offers are unparalleled.
So, make the most use of this list and choose a design tool to create a seamless user experience for your product’s customers.
Which of these five tools are you planning to use?
Do share your opinion with us!
Author’s bio:
Priya Jain is a professional copywriter with 8 years of experience. She has an MBA and engineering degree. When she is not writing, you will find her teaching math, spending her day running behind her toddler, and trying new recipes. You can follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
