UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) design are two abbreviations that have since become household terms in digital design as a whole. Much of this hinges on the fact that they’re nothing short of vital to online product development and mobile graphics design; two of the biggest fields that are robustly growing at present. Think of UX and UI as the pinions that are necessary to keep the app and product development machine going.
That alone is enough to underscore the importance of digital designers. It’s for this reason why it’s also imperative that designers be given the right tools to bring their ideas to life accurately and brilliantly every time There are a multitude already available but these six tools we’ve listed are all diamonds in the rough, to say the least, as you’ll soon find out.
1. Sketch
If there’s one tool that should never fail to make it into this list, it’s Sketch. Praised largely for its user-friendly interface, it’s the perfect tool for UI and UX designers who are beginners and experts alike. Fundamentality that is a word that befits Sketch es it has everything designers need. With the latest addition of the prototyping feature, Sketch has ascended the rungs of excellence to the point that it already has minimal competition. The Timeline feature also makes 2D animation and 3D animation possible with Sketch, so the sky’s pretty much the limit with this platform.
While Sketch may seem like too basic but that’s practically why a lot of designers love it It’s a no-nonsense vector building platform, after all. Its artboards — as said above, recently improved by the prototyping feature — are easy to work with. Prototyping essentially renders what you’re doing into what it would readily look like when viewed from a mobile or web screen.
Furthermore, Sketch is also the preferred tool for wireframing (high-fidelity), which is another essential process in UX designing. With that said, if you want a UX tool that makes your life easy as a designer, you can never go wrong with Sketch.
2. Overflow
Overflow capitalizes on an aspect of UI design that a lot designers usually have to scale a proverbial mountain for user flows. User flows are essentially the links between each screen that you design; hence, it provides plenty of opportunities to tell a story. Telling a story with their designs is always a good thing for any product, but the challenge lies in being able to arrange your designs in such a way that user flow would always be smooth.
With Overflow, this task is made simpler focusing a lot on ensuring that they would be able to integrate itself into other design tools in order to make user flow creation hassle-free and beautiful at the same time It basically helps you sync your designs better and aids you in laying out and implementing your user flows. Lastly, it also assists you in presenting your designs in a way that it wouldn’t be hard to capture the fancy of your users, thanks to its emphasis on story-telling.
3. Mockplus
Prototyping is where the majority of the strengths of Mockplus lie. It’s a preliminary process that involves the conception of your design and dictates its direction from there. This is why prototyping is a step that a lot of good designers never take for granted. Mockplus guarantees quick and simple prototyping; an aspect that is lacking in a lot of tools that came before it It offers support for multiple platforms, and lets you build prototypes and wireframes on Android, i05, and desktop at the same time If you want a design tool that would let you focus more designing rather than taking a long time to understand each feature and functionality, Mockplus is perfect fit for you.
4. Visual Inspector
What’s interesting about Visual Inspector is that it’s a Chrome extension. It seeks to help designers by completely excising the need for them to plunge into dense assortments of codes just to get their design to look how they want it to look. What it does is it renders real-time webpages for you to view and edit without having to modify its codes yourself. Without a doubt, this is an ultimate time-saver, especially for the coding-challenged designer, allowing him to focus his efforts on actually designing the UI.
5. Figma
The nifty feature of Figma is that it is an entirely web-based platform. You can work solely from your Browser after logging in with your account or opt to use their app instead. With the help of its own Cloud technology, you’ll never have to worry about not saving your work and accessing your files from more than one device. Like Sketch, it also prioritizes making its interface as easy to go through and get the hang of as possible. Figma’s Frames (equivalent to Sketch’s Artboards) also gives you the ability to place other Frames within one Frame. This opens up plenty of opportunities for design incorporation and masking content. It also allows real-time working and has excellent prototyping capabilities as well Overall, it is viable alternative to Sketch.
6. Creately
This platform lets you create flowcharts for designers who like to prepare workflow diagrams in order to map their designs better. From user flow to building sitemaps, this tool helps you draw these essentials to design organization and planning. Its built-in canvas automatically expands as you create your charts and diagrams so you won’t have to worry about running out of space. You can freely enter text into each shape you draw and connect with one another. 2D animation flowcharts can also be made by those who want to exercise their creativity in presenting diagrams. Lastly, he Cloud-based technology ensures better collaboration with your team as well, besides saving plenty of time.
Conclusion
Each of these platforms has its own unique strength that makes it stand out What is apparent, though, is that tools that ease the usual burdens of designers – those that simplify what is complex – are the ones that gain a good number of patronage.
Furthermore, rest assured that they work with great synergy if you decide to use them together. All of these tools’ developers are proactive in improving their platforms with the passage of time as well They understand what a designer needs and deliver solutions to the basic problems involved in UI and UX design. As a designer in 2018, it’s best for you to familiarize yourself with them, especially if you want to hone your designing skills better and take your graphics design projects to newer heights.
