8 UX & Digital design tools that we use
There are lots of lists for this kind of thing — but here’s our take on things at William Joseph
Google Analytics
Still the first place that we head to when looking at a new site. Even when starting something from scratch, there’s almost always a web property that you can investigate at least to some degree. In a more developed site, looking at where various visitors are starting, dropping off and heading to is invaluable information when designing user journeys, site architecture or digital campaigns.
Inspectlet
Live captures of users actually on your site still amazes even hardened digital professionals. In terms of getting senior buy in it is like rocket fuel. Over a long enough time period, even the free 3 videos / day gives you a sense of how people are using your site which just analytics tools struggle to do… Above all else, we find it crucial for showing stakeholders how little time they have to capture peoples’ attention. Lots of great options for exporting and sharing, even on the free version.
CrazyEgg
Another visualisation tool for better understanding how visitors are navigating around your site. Linking into Google Analytics data, CrazyEgg shows heatmaps of where people click.
What Users Do
Part of a new breed of sites that are looking to help digital teams outsource their user testing for when you aren’t able to or can’t afford to get a physical lab set up. One of the best features is pre-set but customisable test scripts, which serve as a great starting point. Whilst £23 / test can feel pricey, it’s still a lot less than the cost of renting an actual user testing lab and then paying for participants on top of that. The free initial video and a free first month’s membership should help persuade those that hold the purse strings too…
Try my UI
Very similar to What Users Do, but with a slightly more flexible Pay as you go project pricing tier, allowing you to pay $150 for 5 tests, rather than a pay monthly arrangement. US based though and has struggled to find us the more specific audiences, which is why we tend to go with WUD if possible…
Adobe XD
We’re still playing around with Adobe’s prototyping offering and how it fits within our design workflow that’s based on Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. There are some great features, in particular the ease of sharing, but this is very much still in the alpha stage and we’ll have to wait months, possibly longer to get to something that gives the same capabilities as even the traditional design tools, let alone Sketch etc.
Huge credit to the team building it though — it must be one of the highest profile software jobs in the world, and to be approaching it with such determination combined with transparency is impressive…
TreeJack
TreeJack is a tool for prototyping and testing Information Architectures which usually underpin site navigations.
Optimizely
Still the biggest and best tool out there for running production level A/B tests. Mind bogglingly complicated if you need it to be — or simple enough for pretty much anyone with a mouse to start generating insights from. Always a little worrying from a performance point of view, to be having all of your visitors load up another JavaScript line before they see your content — but there are huge resources from Optimizely’s side to reduce this. We’re yet to use it in an App, but can’t wait to do so!
