If you’re a UX designer, you know how important it is to have the right tools. It’s no secret that good quality apps can make your job easier, help you create better designs, and ultimately make your workflow more efficient.
But how do you find the best app for your needs? With so many options out there, and so many new apps coming onto the market every day, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices and end up with a lot of apps that just don’t work quite right.
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best apps for ux designers
UI and UX are two distinct facets of web design, yet they work hand-in-hand. While UI focuses on your design interface and how a user interacts with it, UX emphasizes a users experience as they use your product or service.
UI design tools give designers what they need to design accurate hi-fi wireframes, mockups, and prototypes and render minimally viable products. They represent the nuts and bolts of a design, communicating its functionality.
UX design tools focus on the user and how they’ll experience the content. These tools can help structure the information architecture, as well as how someone will flow through the experience. Since this is more conceptual, UX tools are about helping a designer paint the broader picture of how content and organization will affect experience.
We’re going to take a look at some UI and UX tools that you may find handy for your design process. Some of these tools have features that work in both UX or UI, but for the sake of your own user experience, we’ve divided the list into two categories
In this list, the first 11 tools mentioned are great for UI design, while 12-17 are great for UX. Let’s dive into each one and learn how you can craft beautiful projects.
1. Sketch
If you have any UI design experience, you’ve heard of Sketch. And there are quite a few reasons why it’s one of the design tools that’s so revered.
Being able to make universal changes — whether it’s through their library of symbols, layer styles, or text styles, or its smooth resizing and alignment features — saves designers time to deliver consistent prototypes. It takes out what’s tedious and lets designers jump in and create. And with a multitude of third-party plugins that integrate without problems, there’s no shortage of tools out there that can be used with Sketch.
2. InVision Studio
With a full suite of applications, InVision gives designers all of the UI design tools they need to create fully realized and functional prototypes with dynamic elements and animations.
Along with these easy-to-use UI design tools, they also make communication easy — with collaboration features that let developers share their work as they design it, receive feedback, and make documented changes at each step. Another useful aspect of InVision is the digital whiteboard that allows team members to get their ideas out there, interact, and get that all important sign-off before moving forward.
3. Axure
Axure functions in prototyping and keeping track of the workflow. It features a smooth interface to document as you go. High fidelity drives this app, resulting in prototypes full of details.
Axure offers many of the other features of popular prototyping and UI design tools. It allows for testing of functionality and puts everything together for an easy developer handoff. This, combined with an emphasis on communication, ensures that everyone on a project is kept up-to-date with progress and changes as they happen in real time, making Axure a solid choice for UI design.
4. Craft
Craft, a plugin from InVision, works right alongside what you might be doing in Photoshop or Sketch, with a sync function that updates what you’re working on. Along with this time-saving feature, Craft offers everything you need for prototyping and collaboration. Changes in styling, edits, and other tweaks are updated across the board so that everyone is referring to and working from the same version of a project.
Craft sets itself apart from other UI design tools with its placeholder content. You get access to both Getty and iStock photos, letting you fill your layout with better visuals. And if there’s data in your layout, you can use your own or bring it in from other sources. Not many UI design tools let you fill your mockups with more meaningful content. This special feature of Craft gives your mockups a more accurate representation of what a final design might look like.
5. Proto.io
In their own words, Proto.io says using their UI design software results in “Prototypes that feel real.” And Proto.io delivers on this, giving you what you need to create, organize, integrate, and test accurate mockups. It also smooths out the collaboration process, fostering communication between team members through comments and video feedback, as well as integrating with some of the more well-known testing products, like Lookback, Userlytics, and Validately.
6. Adobe XD
It’s hard to knock Adobe off of their status as royalty in design software — their kingdom of design products reigns in the creative cloud. Adobe XD offers vector-based user interface tools for creating prototypes and mockups with an interface that’s familiar to anyone who has used other Adobe products. This, along with real-time collaboration, makes it a go-to for many UI designers.
Adobe XD has many sophisticated tools for UI designers, but it is also stocked with what designers need to whip up interactions and other dynamic elements that can be integrated into prototypes or mockups. It’s one of the rare design platforms that can combine different disciplines together, without anything lacking.
7. Marvel
Whether you’ve been a UI designer for a while or if you’re just stepping into the role, Marvel’s design platform makes things easy. With the ability to create both low fidelity and hi-fi wireframes, interactive prototypes, and do user testing, it gives a UI designer everything they need — all wrapped into an intuitive interface. Marvel also has a feature called Handoff that gives developers all the HTML code and CSS styles they need to start building.
8. Figma
Figma lets designers build dynamic prototypes and mockups, test them for usability, and sync up all of the progress. Figma allows for a collaborative environment where multiple people can work on a project at the same time, much like Google Docs — letting you see who has it open for real-time collaboration. You’ll see who’s working and what they’re doing. It’s also browser-based, making it accessible to everyone in an instant. And as an added bonus, it’s free for individual use so you can check it out and get familiar with how it works.
9. Framer X
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Framer X has evolved from its early days as a code-only prototyping application. Today it offers a host of UI design tools for building functional prototypes and testing for usability. Its ability to work with React makes it ideal for UI designers who like to stay on top of the newest web design innovations.
Framer X also offers a variety of plugins in their store, giving UI designers features such as UI kits for integrating social media channels like Snapchat and Twitter, players for embedding a variety of media, grids, and other useful components that can be easily integrated. It’s a great interface design tool with a fairly east learning curve.
10. Origami Studio
With a Facebook pedigree (it was built by and for Facebook designers), Origami Studio packs in more complexity than something like InVison or Sketch — which are a bit easier for beginners in design. For those who need a more advanced prototyping tool as a part of their design system, Origami Studio has a lot to offer.
This platform has the tools you need to build complete prototypes that are powered by a sophisticated patch editor, giving designers the opportunity to integrate advanced functionality. Prototypes end up looking and working like a real app or webpage.
Origami Studio also integrates well with Sketch. If you’re working in parallel with Sketch, it lets you brings in layers and copy and paste them directly without any hang-ups.
best free ui design software
When starting out as a UI designer, a large part of the learning curve is getting to grips with industry tools. Throughout the workflow, you’ll need various programs and platforms to achieve your goals—whether it’s communicating efficiently with your team or creating animations.
Before we look at the UI toolset, let’s recap on what it is that UI designers actually do.
UI design is all about how the user interacts with an interface: how do they get from one screen to another? What visual touch points do they encounter?
This is all decided by the UI designer: they take the UX designer’s blueprint and turn it into something visual and interactive. In terms of day to day work, this involves everything from designing buttons to choosing colours and fonts, to prototyping and carrying out usability testing.
If you’re making the move into UI design, you need to be familiar with the tools of the trade. Over time, you’ll discover which ones are most effective for you—but to get you started, we’ve devised a list of some of the most popular in the industry. And if you’re itching to get designing already, check out the free tutorial below in which UI design mentor Elizé demonstrates how to design your first app screen with Adobe XD. For the full course, you can sign up here for free, or subscribe to the CareerFoundry YouTube channel.https://www.youtube.com/embed/ot_XIhpJezs
1. InVision
InVision is a web-based prototyping tool popular with both UX and UI designers alike. You can upload static design files and quickly turn them into high-fidelity, interactive prototypes. It’s also great for collaboration, as clients and other team members can comment directly on your designs, and you can share your ideas across the team using Boards. They’re always adding new features, such as this Craft Prototype for seamless crossover between Sketch and InVision, and sign-up is free. This is one of the most well-known tools in the industry, so it’s definitely worth using.
2. Zeplin
As a UI designer, it’s essential that you’re able to communicate your designs to the development team—and Zeplin has been built to facilitate this. All you need to do is upload your designs, and Zeplin will automatically generate specs and guidelines accordingly. For frontend developers, it reduces the time and effort needed to convert your designs by generating platform-related code snippets. For smooth collaboration, you can also integrate Zeplin with Slack channels and add notes for the developers directly in the platform.
3. Balsamiq
When it comes to rapid wireframing, Balsamiq is a much-loved tool within the design industry. Available as a desktop or Cloud app, it markets itself as the perfect “in-between” tool for designers, product managers and developers. Perhaps one of the most valuable features for UI designers is the User Interface library—you can choose from a range of different UI elements and just drag and drop them onto the wireframe. Once your prototype is ready, you can print it out or run usability tests online before handing over to the developers.
4. Sketch
The digital design app that every UI pro needs: Sketch. This is a vector-based tool, so you can easily resize anything that you draw without losing sharpness. However, this is much more than just a drawing tool—Sketch is also great for wireframing and prototyping. Available for Mac only, you pay for the app once and can then use it for as long as you want, but you’ll need to renew your license every year in order to get updates. You can find everything you need to know about getting started with Sketch right here. And if you’re just starting out, here are 5 common mistakes to avoid when learning Sketch as a UI designer.
5. Figma
Discover the very first in-browser interface design tool, Figma. With powerful editing tools and loads of handy features, Figma is a one-stop shop for designing, prototyping and gathering feedback. UI designers especially can take advantage of constraints feature, which adapts your designs when the screen size changes. With the components feature, it’s also extremely easy to reuse elements across your designs. To find out more about how Figma works, check out their blog, or see for yourself with a free trial. You’ll find a complete hands-on introduction to designing and prototyping with Figma in this video tutorial. And, if you’re wondering whether Sketch or Figma is better for you, you might like to read our comparison of the two!
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6. Flinto
Flinto is an interactive prototyping app for Mac which offers pretty much everything you need to bring your designs to life. Design micro-interactions and screen transitions, add video layers simply by dragging video or GIF files straight into your designs, incorporate UI sound effects and customizable scrolling—the list goes on. You can also import your files from Sketch and, finally, preview how your designs look using the free iOS viewer.
7. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a vector-based tool for designing and prototyping user experiences for web, mobile, and even voice! If you’re already familiar with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, you’ll feel right at home in Adobe XD—an extremely versatile tool which offers a whole host of features for designing, prototyping, sharing, collaborating, and creating a complete design system. XD natively supports Windows 10 and macOS, and is also available as a mobile app for both Android and iOS. If you’re interested in learning Adobe XD, a great starting point is this free, hands-on set of five video tutorials on YouTube.
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