You have come up with a great design for your next website. It’s ticked all the right boxes on the design checklist: unique, creative, visually stunning. Wait! Aren’t you missing something?
Yes! All that effort isn’t enough to guarantee success. Whether or not the design comes with a great User Experience(UX) will determine the outcome of your efforts.
The number of products that users are exposed to and the volume of interactions that happen with each product has increased exponentially these last few years. And with each passing year, users demand better interfaces for the products they use.
The trend signals current realities:
User expectations are on the rise as the quality of products they interact with is rising. This again points to the fact that companies are investing more in UX design.
UX that is simple and intuitive can greatly improve audience engagement and conversion rates. But the UX space is getting more competitive and keeping users happy is becoming more challenging. Luckily, new UX design tools meant to simplify the task of the design community are being launched every year. We have picked some must have tools for your design toolkit that cover all key design activities like research, design and collaboration.
Research: Tools that help understand user outlook towards the product or service. You can use A/B testing to measure the impact of design changes on user engagement.
Design: Tools used to wireframe or build prototypes of the idea before the actual coding starts. Having a prototype/wireframe is essential to communicate project ideas and requirements clearly.
Collaboration: Tools for workflow design. These help in streamlining and simplifying communication between team members and other stakeholders.
Each tool we introduce here packs a set of unique features, functionalities and values. Use any one or even better, a combination of these, to deliver an outstanding user experience design.
Research Tools
Real user feedback is a key input to data-driven decision-making that modern businesses prefer. Measuring and analyzing actual user behavior helps in early identification and correction of design issues.
1. UsabilityTools
The platform enables both qualitative and quantitative measurement of end user experience. It comes integrated with a research panel of over 10 million people from all over the world.
2.MouseStats
Track all the actions of your website visitors – the mouse movements, scrolls, clicks and keystrokes. The platform provides interactive heatmaps which show which areas of the page are attracting more attention. You can also track data from webform visitors to see which fields cause dropouts.
3.TryMyUI
The service is a good way to garner qualitative feedback about site design from end users. It lets you see and hear what users are thinking while they navigate the website performing the tasks you want. The tests are all self-moderated.
4.Loop11
Loop11 offers scenario based testing services to UX designers. It is an automated service that you can use to run web usability tests on a large number of users. The service also tests how your website UX ranks in comparison to competition.
5.Appsee
This platform helps track mobile application user interactions in real-time. The analytics are then made available to mobile app designers on a dashboard. Data is provided in the form of easy visualizations like touch heatmaps, conversion funnels and crash recordings.
Design Tools
Building a smaller version of a system to elicit early feedback can lead to significant design improvements. Wireframing and prototyping techniques can reduce the risks and costs of getting the design wrong.
1.Balsamiq
Simple tools with a short learning curve are an instant hit with users. Balsamiq offers a look and feel that rivals the one you get when sketching the traditional way (with pencil and paper). If you need to quickly create and share mockups with clients, this is the tool for you.
2.Axure & Justinmind
This platform lets you simulate your mobile app prototype in an actual device. The tool is designed to help you build high-fidelity mockups and wireframes.
Collaboration Tools
Great designs are often the works of several minds working in tandem. Tools that enable easy collaboration and sharing between large teams and multiple stakeholders are helpful in meeting design goals.
1.InVision
Invision is a web-based and mobile app that turns designs into fully active prototypes with gestures, transitions and animations. Clients can provide feedback in the form of comments on your designs, and you can keep them up to date with the project’s progress in real time through actionable to-do lists.
Knowing the right tools to use is important for a UX designer. Adding these tools to your design repertoire can automate and simplify design tasks, helping you save time and effort. Additionally, it sharpens your skills and keeps you ahead of the curve in the design department.
The author of the article works as a UI UX developer in a leading graphic and designing company in India. In this article, the author has suggested some top UI UX tools that every designer need.