Okay User Experience, Let’s Do This
Like many designers I spend a good portion of my day using applications both native and online. Since I tend to bounce between traditional design projects and interactive design projects I rely on a broad set of tools. Prior to a couple of years a go Adobe Creative Suite, specifically Illustrator and Photoshop were my go to tools when it came to layout of web and other UI projects. Since then a slew of tools have entered the marketplace and have become the go to tools for a young and experienced designers alike. While Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks were serviceable tools, each were never specifically geared towards UX/UI work. While they are now much better now then they have ever been, specifically dealing with multiple screen sizes, typography, symbols, and prototyping, sort of. I’m looking at you Preview CC. The way they accomplished these things still left much to be desired.
In steps Adobe’s new tool, User Experience, or so Adobe wants us to believe. While it’s a step in the right direction it also serves as an admission that even Adobe knows Photoshop and Illustrator are not the long term solution for UX/UI work.
As a relative late-comer UE, has some existing competition. Over the past few years many new tools have entered the market looking to capture a young set of designers not as dependent on Adobe’s tools. While there are definitley other tools, Bohemian Coding’s Sketch has been the leader in the world of not-Adobe design tools for UX/UI designers.
While there has been some growing pains, overall Bohemian Coding, seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what UI and UX designers are looking for. Multiple screen sizes are handled well, style management is good, above average vector tools and layers are as easy to manage as any Adobe product. Must-haves like the ability to establish your grid, device previewing, refined symbol management, great exporting functions and an intuitive interface are all there. Support from the likes of Invision, who recently developed Craft, a free suite of tools that make Sketch even more powerful just add to the appeal. To top it off Sketch’s third-party community of developers is actively creating new extentions that extend Sketch’s usefulness.
With such a strong competitor User Experience had better come out swinging if Adobe wants to pull existing Sketch users not as invested in the Adobe ecosystem. For their sake and as an Adobe fan, I hope it pans out and doesn’t just go the way of our buddy Fireworks.
To answer this question for myself I plan to work in both User Experience and Sketch to compare the tools in my normal workflow, which consists of creating a sitemap and content planning in Slickplan, creating wireframes in Sketch/User Experience and prototyping in Invision.
I hope to come away either sold on User Experience, sold on sticking with Sketch or optimistic that Adobe is on it’s way and while it may not be ready, excited that one day it will be.
