What are the 7 most essential digital tools for UI/UX designers?

At some point of time during your User Experience and User Interface Design training you’ll have to create blueprints that don’t fit in your mind. That is why digital tools for UI/UX designers have been developed that make your ideas more expressive and tangible to copywriters, UX strategy teams, developers, and anyone else who you’re collaborating with to create a final web product.

This article discusses the 5 most essential software applications that UI/UX designers find indispensable. This piece has been written from the perspective of a beginner to design and your opinions after advanced use might well change depending on what’s currently available in the industry.

1. Whiteboard and Marker: Understanding the problem and defining it, comprehending the user and his/her background, storyboarding, creating critical screens, summarizing, and discussing alternatives are the stepping stones to creating a great mobile app or web interface. “The board and the marker are the simplest but the most effective freehand tools for the job”, says Harsha Kakkeri, CEO and founder of Designboat UI/UX school, who impart one of the most popular UI/UX design courses in India and beyond, with campuses in Bengaluru, Delhi, Gurgaon, Chennai, and other metros.

2. Google Forms: Online surveys are the most popular mechanisms to gather user data. Google Forms are the most widely used survey tools in use.

3. Google Analytics: If you already have a working website and you want information on the kind of demographic that’s most interested in the new app that you’re working, on, there’s no better tool than Google Analytics to break down your users into identifiable groups with categorizable attributes. This is a great source for UX research.

4. Balsamiq: Once you’ve drawn your pen-and-paper or whiteboard-and-marker diagrams, you’re ready to work on wireframes. Wireframes help you create, iterate, and communicate your app’s interfaces and interactions at a high level. Balsamiq is easy to learn and excellent for beginners to UX and UI.

5. Adobe XD/Sketch/Figma: The jury is still out on which of these 3 tools are the best. As a beginner you can’t go wrong with any one of these. Sketch is know for its huge range of plugins to enhance functionality. However, it only works on Mac. Figma has much of what Sketch has but it started with collaboration and accessibility features earlier than Sketch. The latter has added collaboration as a feature recently. Adobe XD is perhaps the fastest of the three tools with certain unique features such as color and logo storage for pattern repetition and ready CSS code handoff for developers. You can easily create prototypes that are clickable on any of these within a week of practice.

6. Flowmapp: This is one of the most well-known UX tools when crafting UX strategy. You can quickly begin your project by developing Information Architecture (IAs), sitemaps, and user flows on Flowmapp.

7. Bugsee: Once you’ve finished developing your mobile app, you can use Bugsee to detect any bugs or crashes that live users could encounter. This phase is particularly important to verify user journeys and ensure that design elements are working according to the strategies that were formed at the beginning.

Have a question? Request a callback from an expert UX & UI training specialist