These days, websites are becoming more and more interactive. From allowing users to insert keywords in a search bar to chat messengers, smart website designers are focusing more on improving the UI/UX of a website/app to make it interactive and drive business revenue. UX and UI are two different facets of web design yet they are connected. UI focuses on design interface and how user interact with it, whereas UX focuses on users experience as they use your product or service.
UI tools give designers what they want to design accurate wireframes, mockups and prototypes and render minimally viable products. UX tools focus on user experience, and can help structure the information architecture. With a lot of focus imposed by companies on UX design, there are many designing tools in the market. Let’s take a look at the best UI/UX design tools that will help you to improve the user experience of your website.
Know the amazing new UI/UX trends at- UI/UX Design Trends In 2019 That Users Like
Sketch is developed especially for Mac OS X users to design websites, icons and interfaces. According to its founder, sketch was designers as an image editor for digital design. Operating like Illustrator and Photoshop, sketch is flexible when it comes to UX design. It has good resizing options, that have been improved, depending on the size of application. Apart from resizing, Sketch has added prototyping to its features that helps designers to transform their designs into interactive prototypes.
Some other advanced features that it provides are stylized vector shapes, 2x zooming export and infinite zooming. It can export images in all three formats- PDF, JPG and PNG. New feature of sketch, performance improvement allowed UX designers to include more texts and images with an aim to give your design, a more creative look. Any process related changes like data resizing or manipulating layers in large documents were simplified with new performance improvement based features.
Launched in 2018, it is another designing tool for UX having a perfect combination of prototyping, design and collaboration, that results in a great design process. One of the main goal of Invision studio is to have an easy prototype building process. With a full suite of apps, InVision gives designers all of the UI design tools they need to create fully realized and functional prototypes with dynamic elements and animations.
With easy-to-use UI design tools, this makes it easy to collaborate with features that allows developers to share their work as they design it, get feedback and make documented changes at every step. Another useful aspect of InVision is the digital whiteboard that allows team members to get their ideas out there, interact and get all important sign-off before moving forward. Vector drawing tool within Invision Studio, helps to create a website rapidly and so saves a lot of time during the design process. With this tool, designers can create apps for various screen sizes of different devices.
It is a browser-based tool which allows real-time collaboration with vector tools that are capable of prototyping, illustration and code generation. Figma includes style libraries that simplifies creation process and updating a design system. It builds flow by connecting screens and adding in elements like transitions, overlays, interactions and so on. Figma also facilitates version control and audits the development process instantly for designers to keep a track of progress of the project. The new enterprise collaboration feature allows each user of the team to be identified by a cursor with his name being highlighted. Main goal of this feature is to maintain a balance in the design process across a team of designers. Figma is an excellent tool that allows designers to get the best review and feedback on designs in a professional manner.
It is a vector-based tool from Adobe that is useful for vector design website wireframing and creating interactive prototypes. It is available on Windows and Mac. Adobe XD offers vector-based tools for creating prototypes and mockups with an interface that’s familiar to anyone who has used other adobe products. Also, it has lots of sophisticated tools for UI designers, but it is also stocked with what designers need to prepare interactions and other dynamic elements that can be integrated into mockups or prototypes.
Responsive resize is an attractive XD feature that saves a lot of development time, particularly when it was required to develop various versions of website and analyze if it is compatible to work across all platforms and devices. Now, Prototype wireframes could now be easily shared with customers with a facility, the earlier activity for developers, to choose the screen size and width, based on which they had to arrange their wireframes before sharing, was not required. It has a desktop preview app which allows record interactions with audio. You can record own voice along with click-through interactions and share it as an MP4 file. It also has voice prototyping capabilities like playback and voice triggers.
It is one of the prominently used tools which is quite popular amongst designers and users also. It had many earlier versions. The new version of Axure comes in with a completely modified layout with major changes in main toolbar, right-hand side panels and library panels. Main toolbar is more prominent and intelligible while the library panel comes in with many in-built icons, which saves the designer, the extra work of making his own icons. Axure offers lots of features of popular prototyping and UI design tools. It allows you to test functions and puts everything together for easy developer handoff.
This, joined with an emphasis on communication, ensures that everybody on a project is kept up-to-date with the progress and changes as they occur in real time, making Axure a great decision for UI design. Responsive resize is an attractive XD feature that has been quite successful to save developers time, particularly when it was needed to develop various versions of a website and find out if it is compatible to work across all platforms and devices. Auto-Animate features of Axure are very useful to create prototypes of websites. Animations plays a big role in giving an artistic look to website, the auto-animate feature prevent errors of mistakes in design.
Launched in 2018, Balsamiq is a web-based tool and work as a GUI for building mockups and wireframes. It is available as a desktop version or as a plugin which can be used with Google Drive. Balsamiq is extremely user-friendly as compared to other tools. Drag-drop feature is very helpful for designers. It is better to present wireframes and mockups rapidly to the client to enable him to make quick decisions. The balsamiq wireframe tool supports various formats. Designers can share their designs on web through interactive PDF files or as images in PNG format.
It is an excellent designer tool that enables quick and innovative designs of wireframes and prototypes. With Marvel, lots of digital products have been built around Marvel. With centralized feedback features of Marvel, designers can expect quick feedback on their designs. Marvel allows creating wireframes, websites and apps from any given device, right from the browser. The designer can rest the complete control of these designs with himself and sync his designs with other development tools like Sketch or Photoshop. With Marvel, designers can present their prototypes in real time. These are interactive prototypes built without coding. Marvel generates the great UX design experience.
Team collaboration is a great quality associated with marvel. Whole team can have a full visibility of the project and can contribute their thoughts on development and feedback as the development process moves on.