Sketching is generally implemented within the user interface design process on its early stage to visualize initial UI representation characteristics. Your design department, usability experts or even end users may contribute to the future interface development by adding their details and suggestions from the very beginning. Many digital solutions have emerged so far to cater to UI design needs.
However, creating a decent UI is pretty far from being a no-brainer. UI design is usually considered to have three essential peculiarities. Simply put, this process is always open to new adjustments; iterative, since several cycles are required to achieve successful results; and incomplete, for it is quite impossible to anticipate all the details beforehand.
In accordance with these three parameters, designers utilize various types of sketching activities. Among the most widely used types are sketches proper, wireframes, mockups and prototypes. One should distinguish between them as the level of complexity and fidelity is quite significant. Please, refer to our recent article to know more about mockups and wireframes.
Basically, paper sketching has got a long history and extensive usage as it helps designers and graphic specialists convey future project ideas in the easiest yet most efficient way. With a plethora of computer-aided design software appeared on the market, you can enhance conventional sketching activities with a scope of brand new options.
For instance, UI design tools enable you to quickly add, remove, resize or replace various UI elements, exchange sketches between different specialists and departments, showcase interim designs to your customers and keep track of the whole design process to validate KPIs. Moreover, fluid layouts and responsive design allows you to share your sketches across multiple devices, no matter what platform or display size you have.
Here we’ve singled out several efficient UI design solutions that can greatly streamline your design performance. If a process of creating low-fidelity sketches is not enough for you, these tools can also help you build high-fidelity types of UI design.
This web-based UI design tool is highly effective due to its range of useful features. Justinmind has got a handy collection of web buttons, menus, charts, and other options that can be used automatically.
You can create your UI designs in no time with updated libraries of UI elements. iOS and Android users are also taken into account, with special out-of-the-box design instruments included for mobile devices.
Main features:
- Unlimited number of users and prototypes
- Over 4000 UI elements in the library
- Animations and effects
- Mobile transitions
- Quick sharing and getting feedback
- Data-driven prototypes
- Export and Documentation
- Designer-Developer collaboration
- 300MB of storage per user
Price: $19 per user/month
2. Sketch.
Sketch has become one of the most popular design solutions among UI and UX designers. This is a flexible vector graphics editor developed exclusively for Apple’s macOS that enables you to create intuitive and stunning user interfaces. Unfortunately, Windows and Linux users are not able to benefit from its advantageous features so far.
This may be the only drawback since a scope of features that Sketch possesses is quite impressive. For instance, you can easily align various grids and layers, make a granular export and have an access to unlimited artboards.
Main features:
- Complete Toolkit
- Non-destructive Editing
- Pixel Precision
- Vector Editing
- Export Presets
- Code Export
- Grid and Guides
- iOS Mirroring
- Quick sync, update and share all your symbols
Price: $99/year
3. Figma.
Figma is a quite new player on the UI design market, however it has already invoked migrations of graphic specialists from other popular design solutions. Having much in common with Sketch, this tool has a great advantage under its belt — it is fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms and available on a desktop or in the browser.
By opting for Figma, you will get adaptable designs with regard to display size change, more granular control over constraints due to flexible layout grids as well as reuse UI design elements.
Main features:
- Crop, Fit and Fill Modes
- Non-destructive Boolean Operations
- Optimized Performance
- Comprehensive Export
- Sketch Import
- Pixel Preview
- Smart Guides
- Vector Networks
- Constraints
- Components
- Layout Grids
- Live Device Preview
- Masks
- Advanced Text Options
Price: Free up to 3 projects. $12 per editor/month with unlimited projects.
4. Zeplin.
Despite the fact that Zeplin is much more of an additional tool, many UI designers can not imagine their design work process in Sketch or Photoshop without Zeplin’s apps getting installed on board. This tool has been geared up specifically to supercharge collaboration between designers and developers.
On the one hand, it enables UI designers to export their sketches and mockups and turn them into actionable guidelines and specs. On the other hand, Zeplin helps frontend developers smoothly generate platform-related code snippets directly out of designs.
Main features:
- Automated units conversion based on your project type and density
- Projects creation from the Web app, directly from the Projects screen
- Available desktop apps for macOS 10.11+ and Windows 7+
- Web app support for Chrome 45+, Firefox 45+, Safari 9+ and Edge 13+
- Intuitive integration for Photoshop CC 2015+ and Sketch 3.4+ plugins
- Smooth adding of a project to Slack from the Dashboard screen
- Automated CSS and HTML snippets generation from layers, colors and text styles
Price: Free for 1 project. $17/month — 3 projects. $26/mo — 12 active projects
This is a relatively new UI/UX solution by Adobe Systems Inc. that provides designers with vast functionality. Using this efficient design tool lets you create everything from the early sketches to mockups and prototypes almost in no time.
With the project development evolves, you can build up a step-by-step design roadmap starting from low-fidelity concepts that can be gradually transformed into high-fidelity prototypes.
Since here in this article we are focused only on the initial sketching stage, here are some useful features of Adobe XD to help you start your UI design. First off, you can add various UI elements like placeholder text, artboards and basic shapes, to name a few. Out-of-the-box wireframe kits with templates and ready-to-use design elements are also here at your designer’s disposal.
Main features:
- Repeat Grid function for quick design elements replication
- Zero lag time while working with multiple artboards
- Smart turn of elements into symbols for further reuse along the project
- Powerful snap-to, measuring and positioning tools and typography
- Quick Photoshop and Illustrator assets import into XD
- Access to Creative Cloud Libraries raster images and character styles
- Prototype sharing via the web to get fast iteration within a team
- Smooth performance across platforms and devices
Price: Free trial available. $9.99/mo for individuals. $29.99/mo per license for businesses
Should you like to keep tabs on UI/UX design solutions, feel free read my stories and contact my team in case of practical tasks!
