When you start out as a UI designer, a major as well as a large part of the learning curve is getting to grips and understanding with industry tools. Throughout the workflow, you will be needing various programs and platforms to achieve your goals. It can be used to communicating efficiently with your team or creating animations.

Before we look at the Essential UI/UX Design Tools, let us understand what it is that UI designers actually do.

UI design is all about how the user interacts with an interface, A UI can be anything from a machine operating interface or console to an everyday use machine: how do they get from one screen to another? What visual touchpoints do they encounter?

All of this is 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 that the UI designer does, mostly involves everything from designing buttons to choosing colours and fonts. They also do prototyping and carrying out usability testing.

If you’re making the move into UI design, you need to understand completely and 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.

Essential UI/UX Design Tools:

1. InVision

InVision is nothing but a web-based prototyping tool popular with both UX and UI designers alike. You are able to upload static design files and quickly turn them into high-fidelity, rich and interactive prototypes. It’s also great for collaboration, as clients and other team members can comment directly on your designs.

You are also able to share your ideas across the team using Boards. InVision is 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 has become essential that you’re able to communicate your designs to the development team—and this is what exactly Zeplin has been built for. All you need to do is upload your designs, and Zeplin will automatically generate the required specs and guidelines accordingly. For frontend developers, Zeplin is able to reduces the time and effort needed to convert your designs by generating platform-related code snippets.

For smooth and easy collaboration, you are also allowed easily integrate Zeplin with Slack channels as well as add notes for the developers directly in the platform.

3. Balsamiq

When it comes to rapid wireframing, Balsamiq is a much-loved tool that is well known within the design industry. This tool is available as a desktop or a Cloud app, it markets itself as the perfect “in-between” tool for designers, product managers and developers.

Balsamiq has one of the most valuable features for UI designers and that is the User Interface library—you can choose from a range of different UI elements and components and just drag and drop them onto the wireframe. Once your prototype is ready, the designers are allowed to print it out or run usability tests online before handing over to the developers.

4. Sketch

The digital design app that every UI designer needs: and that is Sketch. This is a vector-based tool, so you can easily resize and scale anything that you draw without losing any kind of 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 you 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 here.

5. Figma

Figma is the very first in-browser interface design tool. With powerful editing tools and loads of handy features that can be used by designers, Figma is a one-stop shop for designing, prototyping as well as gathering feedback. UI designers especially can take advantage of constraints feature that is provided, which adapts your designs when the screen size changes. This is very useful for designers. With the components feature, it’s also extremely easy to reuse elements in many projects across your designs.

Recommended Read: UI vs UX – Knowing the Difference

6. Flinto

Flinto is an interactive prototyping app for Mac. This tool offers pretty much everything you need to bring your designs to life. There are many things that you can do with Flinto.

From 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 to and from Sketch. You can also preview how your designs look using the free iOS viewer.

7. Adobe XD

Adobe XD is nothing but 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. This tool 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.

8. Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh.

 Adobe Illustrator was reviewed as the best vector graphics editing program in 2018 by PC Magazine. This is one of the most preferred tools that is used for UI designing and development. It is used for designing of many prototypes. The tool is easy to understand by beginners and you can create and edit stunning designs using this tool.

9. UXPin 

UXPin is another great tool that can be used to design interactive forms and webpage layouts. It also has the feature to include components, variable interactions, conditional logic and many more. It starts at a price of about 20$ per month all the way up to 29 $ per editor per month.

You can use advanced features such as code-based designing, component designing and more.

10. ProtoPie

For prototyping purposes, you can make use of ProtoPie. If provides all the prototyping faclilities that modern tool provides but at a fraction of the price of what othes have to offer. The basic version costs about 11$ per month.

Also Read: Beginners Guide For UX Design

Building your UI toolkit

This is just a handful of tools that a UI designer might work with(Essential UI/UX Design Tools). When choosing your tools, there are certain things to take into consideration. First of all, what kinds of projects will you focus on? Do you need tools that are suitable for designing websites, mobile apps, or both? Of course, you also need to make sure that the tools you choose are compatible with the laptop or system with which you’re working.

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There are two things in this world where if you do not do properly in certain social situations, the memory is going to haunt you for the rest of your life: these are handshakes and doors. Let talk something about doors: I’m surprisingly bad at detecting whether I need to “push” or “pull” a particular door in order to get through the door. It is a blessing or a curse in reality, but mostly it functions as a curse. Now I could either go on a spiritual walk where I should self reflect as well as analyze where this inability is coming from.

OR the door design has utterly failed badly in order to add value to the end-user. The door was designed with a specific UX keeping in mind which was to allow users to open the door and move through it easily. User Experience (UX) is the experience that a user has with every part of a product or service. The specific purpose of the User Experience (UX) design is to be able to firstly create an easy and pleasant experience. Secondly to help the users to achieve their goals.

Many of us think that the UX with UI(User Interface) as the visual design and the interface of a website or a mobile application. UX is nothing but the interface of a user with the UI. User Experience demands a huge amount of testing and research in order to serve its purpose. UX designers must take this point into consideration that the users need. It must be an important role in determining the user experience of a particular UI.

You need to build a carefully crafted experience in order to satisfy the end-users. There are quite a few pitfalls that are faced when designing the User Experience. The following list includes the most common mistakes for avoiding a bad UX.

Planning User Experience at the Beginning of Development

UX design is profoundly and deeply rooted in research about your product users, and your website or your mobile application needs to be tailored to them. UX design is an ongoing process, and you have to carefully and cautiously listen to your end user’s preferences. It’s important to know what they like and dislike and continuously adjust your product according to them.

You may have an initial idea about what your end users are like and that can be a great premise at the beginning of any development process. However,  you don’t survey your end-users or run tests, you shall never truly know about what they need. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you know about your users, you will probably never will.

Disconnect with your User

Why do you require a good UX? The short answer is to have a lasting impression!
A longer answer is that you need UX to provide your users with a whole new sense of meaning as well as a personal connection with your product. Meaningful products are able to provide value to end-users so that your product becomes personally significant to that user.

The disconnect occurs when your users experience something from your product based on the limited information that they got from a source, and you fail in order to meet the expectations. Phones are one of the most personal items that people possess, and your product on their device means that your product has a place in their life.

So once again, you need to focus on providing users what they want and being able to offer them real value. Here is a short and quick test that you can do right now. In order to test your connection with the end-user. Write down 3 to 5 benefits that your users get from your end product. How many steps are required for your user to reach those benefits
The lesser the steps the better.

Designing for yourself and NOT the user.

Too often, you design the product for yourself and not the end-user. This is not what the audience wants. Try to separate the personal preferences from the user preferences. Remember, always design the website or mobile app for the end-user who actually use your website or mobile app. Chances are that your users don’t want or need the same things that you do.

If you are looking for customer satisfaction, and want to measure customer satisfaction. You need to make sure that you send in your product feedback request after the user has used your product for a couple of days. Don’t disturb users while they are interacting with your product or website. Do not fall into the trap of thinking your end users will be using the product the same as you do, they never will.

Read More: UI vs UX – Knowing the Difference

Following Your Competition Too Closely

There is some amount of danger to follow your competition too closely. What works for some users might not be able to work for others. You want to differentiate from your competitors and not imitate them. Use what you have learned from them and combine this with your unique idea to give something new to your target users. With the enormous number of apps that are being circulated in the market, you need to stand out by demonstrating your innovation and value delivery.

Overwhelming your user with too much content

You should use your content to add value to your end-user as you are guiding them through your website or mobile application. But this does not mean that most of the content should be on the landing page! You do not want to overwhelm your users with information or features. Because it will either frustrate your user or have a supersaturation effect on them.

Supersaturation occurs when there is just too much information that is presented to the end-users that the audience’s eye “gets used to” to the sensory overload that stops them from absorbing relevant information. You need to keep it simple. Present users with enough information to complete their task, no more information are required

Having an overly complex UI design

Complex UI design can easily serve to destroy the user experience if its confusing or just too simple too much. You should aim to make things usable and pretty but most importantly meaningful. The key with patterns and trends is to find the balance between what looks nice and what value is provided by them. Design the UI first then create the most minimal UI necessary for achieving the UX.

Confusing UI with UX

Often UX and UI are being used interchangeably.
In a way, UI and UX are connected. It is hard to work on one design without considering the other. UX design is more effortless and natural to the end-user. Whereas the UI design relies on more aesthetically pleasing factors of the interface. UX is the structure of the app or website, but the UI is what the user interacts with. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that your app will be able to work great because it looks great

Collecting Feedback Too Soon

Collecting feedback too soon for your product app or website may just backfire. According to studies, it attracts more negative reviews than positive reviews. People just love turning a matter over and over again before they arrive at a conclusion. Let users just go through the full experience before asking for their opinion. If you want fair feedback, then wait for some time. Otherwise, you might just annoy them.

You may also like to know: Difference between Web design and UX design

Conclusion

As you have seen there are various factors to be noted and taken care of for getting a better UI and UX. It is essential that we do not ignore the fact that UI and UX together stand for an improved and seamless experience for the user when using any app or website or software. If you’re looking to hire UI/UX designers for your project then do contact us at enquiry@nimapinfotech.com. You can also hire UI UX Designer in Dubai, UAE. We have the most talented and experienced designers ready to onboard for your business project.