Design your way

Before you decide which UX and UI tools might serve you best, we suggest you ask yourself these questions:

What do you need in a prototyping tool? For majority of applications, having one that has the features and functionality you need can be a huge time saver.
What do you plan to use the tool for? Whether it’s a for a website, a mobile app, or a desktop app can make a difference in the type of tool you will want to select.
How much interactivity should your UX/UI tool support? Make certain that free or low cost tools will give you the interactive functionality you need.
How large is your project? If it is a team effort, selecting a UX/UI tool that supports collaboration and includes program, management capabilities is practically a must

Other things to take into account include native versus web apps, costs, and learning curves. And, don’t forget the importance of usability metrics.

To help you make the right choice or choices, we’ve compiled this listing of the most valuable UX and UI tools on the market today.

InVision

InVision is the world’s leading product design and collaboration tool. It’s equally useful for individuals and small teams, and if you work on multiple projects, or projects involving large numbers of team members, the cloud-based Enterprise version is perfect.

InVision Enterprise can accommodate an unlimited number of team members working on an unlimited number of projects.

InVision’s unlimited testing capability, which allows you to test your prototypes directly on users’ mobile devices, record their interactions with your prototypes, hear their voices, and even see their faces, is hugely helpful. Feedback doesn’t get much more contextual than that.

With such relevant feedback, you’ll have the power to make the right UX and UI decisions quickly, rather than having to rely on days or weeks of serial usability testing activities.

As a project leader or a team member, you will quickly rely on InVision’s collaboration capability. Any stakeholder with access can comment directly on the design as it unfolds, in real time. And, as a bonus, your first prototype is free.

Proto.io

If you’ve been searching for a high-fidelity prototyping tool with powerful collaborating features, you need look no further than Proto.io.

Some prototyping tools, including many of the more advanced ones, can link screens together, but don’t go beyond that. With this tool, you can create prototypes that are feature-rich, animated, and interactive, and do so in minutes – without having to rely on coding.

That’s half the story. The other half is your ability to overcome those pesky communication gaps that can exist between the project manager and the team, between team members, and among other project stakeholders.

Proto.io gives you the capability of producing prototypes that are so realistic that your team, or your company, will be able to make the right decisions before investing resources in the final design and development efforts.

Appsee Mobile App UX Analytics

Appsee’s app analytics platform goes beyond reporting basic, quantitative data by providing mobile teams with visual data. The user recordings and touch heatmaps allow you to see for yourself how users actually behave within your app. These tools can help you pinpoint where you can optimize your user experience and troubleshoot issues from performance to usability.

In conjunction with these visualization tools, Appsee supplies mobile teams with insights regarding retention, user journeys, usage, and conversion funnels.

These insights can answer questions like: “Which navigation path do my users take the most? “ Or “How many users return to my app after a month?” Overall they can help paint a clearer picture of how your users behave.

Pidoco

Pidoco offers a better way to create and share beautiful, interactive wireframes. This web app has it all, from making easy sketches, to making custom templates, adding interactive elements, and using features that allow quick and easy previews of your work as you progress.

Your prototypes feature all of the necessary clicks and touch gestures you’ll need to trigger the system reactions you are looking for. Pidoco offers four different plans, ranging from the Starter Plan (2 projects/ month), to the Platinum Plan (100 projects/month), and you can try any of their plans for free.

Lucidchart

Lucidchart is an online, cloud-based, multipurpose wireframing and diagramming application that will be an excellent choice if you are looking for an easy way to sketch and share professional-looking wireframes and mockups.

Lucidchart employs drag and drop functionality, a variety of useful keyboard shortcuts, and features a large library of icons for the full range of device types. This application can be used on PCs, Macs, and all browsers, and it is fully integrated with Google Apps, Google Drive, Visio, and Jive.

PowerMockup

If you are a PowerPoint user, PowerMockup is a wise choice. This prototyping toolkit enables you to create mockups and wireframes for virtually any website, or for any mobile or desktop application.

Select your shapes and icons from the PowerMockup library, drag and drop them onto a PowerPoint slide, and let PowerPoint functionality do the rest. The PowerMockup library is constantly being added to, and you can add your own custom shapes, and share them with other users as well.

Notism Collaboration

Notism Collaboration is the ideal choice for creative teams who would benefit from having a real-time design and video platform through which team members can discuss and share their design efforts with others.

You can share mockups, videos, interactive web and mobile prototypes, or any other design related activity.

Notism provides everything needed to ensure that team members and project stakeholders are always able to participate in the feedback loop. You can also use this handy toolkit to support your task management needs, including enhanced data backup and security features.

Loop11

Loop11 is the type of usability tool that individuals or teams look for when they need a quick way to perform website, wireframe, and prototype UX testing.

Instead of tossing your design over the fence and waiting for a response, Loop11 enables you to carry on a continuous conversation with your customers and users.

This usability tool provides heatmaps, clickstreams, task analysis, and other feedback types that enable you to make data-driven design decisions with confidence. It offers the perfect solution for all types of usability testing, including A/B testing.

Form Analytics by UseItBetter

Form Analytics by UseItBetter is an invaluable tool for analyzing user data; particularly with respect to form abandonment, fixing forms, and improving conversion rates. This usability tool may be more specialized than most you could choose from, but it gives you the information you need to fix problems or potential problems on the spot.

Form Analytics can also be a tremendous form event tracking time saver. A couple of clicks gives you all of the metrics you might need to determine which form field or fields are causing customers to drop out, and why that is the case.

Patternry

If you are fortunate enough to have all the UI and UX work you can handle, Patternry might just be one of the most useful tools you can have for storing your design and code assets and sharing them with your team.

Patternry gives you the ability to store more than just shapes and icons. Design patterns run the gamut from shapes and icons, to code and screenshots, to guidelines and recorded or documented discussions. You can store all of your valuable design assets in a logical, carefully arranged way that not only supports your deliverables, but gives you and your team a library of reusable design patterns as well.

As you can see, there are a number of truly excellent prototyping and UX and UI tools to choose from; and you can feel free to do so without fear of making a poor decision. UI design is one thing, but having an ability to verify the UX performance of that design can be something else entirely.

Because of this, we’ve included several usability tools that are easy to use while providing rapid feedback of qualitative results. Whether you are happy with our selections, or you believe we have left something out, we would like to hear from you.