You can create email & text campaigns, create customizable widgets or create printable PDFs with Feedier to collect some feedback. And your users will be able to get rewarded with coupons, downloadable files, custom messages and even money transfer via PayPal.
15 useful UI/UX tools for designers in 2022
From doing early whiteboard exercises to working on the finished product, each stage of the design and product development process is now helped by a whole range of tools. The usability and accessibility of these tools have never been higher, and it’s making product development easier and more powerful for everyone.
- Maze : Remote testing for agile teams
- Sketch : The digital design platform
- Adobe XD : The UI/UX design solution for websites, apps, and more
- Balsamiq : The rapid, effective, and fun wireframing software
- Figma : The collaborative interface design tool
- InVision : Digital product design, workflow, and collaboration
- Marvel : The design platform for digital products
- Axure : Ux prototypes, specifications, and diagrams in one tool
- Framer : The prototyping tool for teams
- UXPin : UI design and prototyping tool
- FlowMapp : The UX tool for web design
- Origami Studio : Design, animate, and protoype
- Proto.io : Prototyping for all
- Wireframe.cc : An app fine-tuned for wireframing
- Webflow : A visual way to build the web
What are UX tools?
UX tools will help you with various tasks at various stages in the product development process, from research and user testing, to wireframing and prototyping, and even managing design activities. They’ll also help you structure information architecture, product experience, and user flow.
Since Lean User Experience (UX) Design is user-centered and relies on a collaborative approach and rapid experimentation and prototyping to get user feedback, it’s a great way of structuring and combining your UX tools into a holistic approach towards a better user experience.
THINK phase: user research tools
Knowing your audience is the first phase in UX design and helps you develop experiences that reflect the voice and fit the needs of your users. To learn about your audience, you’ll need user research tools and a few other UX resources.
1. Interview tools
User Interviews
What it is: User Interviews is a user research platform that helps UX and product teams recruit audiences for remote or in-person studies. The platform helps user-centric companies find participants for interviewing and testing so they can create better products for their users.
What it helps you do: find and interview the right users for your UX research. The platform handles everything from recruiting, screening, scheduling, and compensating for any type of research project, with automated features that help you save time and effort.
Dovetail
What it is: Dovetail is cloud research software for notetaking, data repository, research analysis, and synthesis. They pride themselves on featuring a rich text collaborative editor, inline tagging, images and files, insights, and sentiment analysis.
What it helps you do: once you have your interview data, use Dovetail to collate and store user research notes, transcripts, images, videos, audio recordings, and more in a single repository. Then, scour through the data to discover patterns and easily tag, filter, and search for highlights.
2. Survey tools
Hotjar Feedback
Improve UX with product experience insights from Hotjar
Google Forms
What it helps you do: create a form to see if potential participants meet the criteria for your research study. Add targeted questions, such as name, role, observation, and time. When responses come in, you can send them automatically to a spreadsheet and easily filter key user journeys, pain points, and other important results.
3. Persona creation tools
Google Analytics
What it helps you do: tools like GA are a great source for understanding user behavior within your product. After your qualitative research, use quantitative data collected from GA to create user (or buyer) personas.
User persona research can reveal users’ concerns and help you create a content strategy to address them. It can also show you the types of users who are interested in your services (age, location, medium they use, social network preferences).
Look at user data from GA to identify key patterns that drive conversions to understand your core audience. Collect data from primary dimensions like demographics and interests, and secondary dimensions like age and gender. You can also use GA for cohort analysis, which is all about breaking users down into groups (cohorts) and studying each group’s behavior.
UXPressia
What it helps you do: once you have your defined buyer personas, use UXPressia to create a visual overview of how customers interact with and experience your website, app, or product across multiple touchpoints.
4. In-house testing tools
FitNesse Tool
What it helps you do: identify all possible issues or bugs through Alpha testing before releasing a product to the public. Once you enter input, FitNesse interprets the data and automatically creates tests, which are then executed by the system. This way, you can access fast user feedback—reducing failures and risks and increasing your product quality through customer validation.
Bugwolf
What it helps you do: get a detailed picture of how real users feel about your product, website, or app through Beta testing. This type of testing takes place in a real-time environment with the feedback of real users. Beta testing can help you:
Bugwolf works with various types of user tests, including performance, usability, content, SEO, security, black-box, cross-browser, software, load, and more. After testing, you’ll get an overview of all bug reports, prioritized by severity, complete with video and audio commentary.
MAKE phase: design tools
User interface (UI) design tools deal with the visual part of UX design—they help designers brainstorm, schedule, and turn ideas into something real. During this phase, designers and developers try to build features to solve a problem or improve the website, app, or product.
1. Flowcharting tools
Lucidchart
Start by making low-fidelity mockups. If elements of your user journey match existing UI design components of your product, drag-and-drop screenshots of your product to your design instead of replicating the components from scratch. Since Lucidchart is cloud-based, you can easily share your design sketches with Project Managers or other stakeholders early on in the process.
You can connect Lucidchart to apps like Salesforce, Microsoft Office, Jira, Confluence, and GitHub to import stored data and create live diagrams that update in real time. Lucidchart works across all devices, supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, and works offline, which means it can run faster.
OmniGraffle
Use OmniGraffle’s diagramming and flowchart capabilities to start mapping user journeys through your product. The interface is laid out just how Mac and iPad users expect, which is something web applications can’t deliver. Being native means OmniGraffle also works offline.
2. Wireframing tools
Balsamiq
Balsamiq uses a non-pixel-perfect visual aesthetic to encourage brainstorming and is optimized for communicating design concepts and generating ideas in the early stages of the software process. It intentionally has "just enough" prototyping capabilities, but not more.
Marvel
What it helps you do: Marvel shines as a rapid wireframing tool. Use it in the early stages of the design process, when you’re forming your concept into something tangible and want to translate it to your team, clients, or stakeholders. Create wireframes within minutes on any device.
You can create screens directly in Marvel or add images from Sketch or Photoshop and sync designs from your cloud storage. There’s also a Sketch plugin, which is great if you use it for app design work and want to take advantage of some of Marvel’s features, like the range of gestures and image layering.
3. Prototyping tools
Figma
Figma’s multi-user real-time collaboration features let you view and work on your project as a team (we’re big fans of Figma, ourselves!). Much like Google Docs, you’ll see who’s working and what they’re doing, and you can leave comments. Everything is synced, so if one team member changes something, it affects the whole project without publishing changes.
UX Analytics and Event Tracking Tools
UX analytics and event tracking tools allow marketers, product teams, sales teams, and user researchers to capture the actions of their websites’ users. You can collect the data to make evaluations, so it helps you understand your customer’s actions and enhance your marketing strategy and user experience.
15. Woopra – End-to-end Customer Journey Analytics
Woopra offers real-time data-driven customer analytics, which enables sales, marketing, and product teams to effortlessly analyze the different segments and funnels on your website. The platform is designed to help startups and enterprises optimize the customer life-cycle by delivering live, granular behavioral data for individual website visitors and customers.
Who Uses Woopra?
Woopra Pricing Information
Woopra gives three subscription plans: Core is /month, which can be a very good offer for start-ups. It is free up to 500K action and 90 Day data retention. Pro ($999/month), and Enterprise (custom priced).
16. Clicky – Web Analytics in Real-Time
Clicky analytically reports various ‘on-site’ actions, such as page views and downloads. It allows you to track whether users proceed to the next step and on what steps they quit. Furthermore, it also demonstrates analytical information on activities on social media. Many analytics tools update once a day, Clicky is one of the exceptions. This tool shows real-time statistics.
Who Uses Clicky?
Clicky Pricing Information
Clicky has both paid and free plans, all new accounts automatically get a free 21 day trial of premium service, with access to all features and the ability to track up to 3 web sites and 1,000,000 daily page views.
17. Hotjar – The Fast and Visual Way to Understand Your Customer
Hotjar is a powerful tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users. By combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, Hotjar gives you the ‘big picture’ of how to improve your site’s user experience and performance/conversion rates.
Who Uses Hotjar?
Hotjar Pricing Information
Hotjar offers 3 different kinds of pricing plans: personal, business, and agency. It is free up to 2,000 page views per day for personal accounts and prices start from $89/month for businesses. Hotjar Pricing.
18. UXtweak – the only UX research platform you need
The tool allows you to replay tasks and visitors for you to see what they experience and what the pain points are. With the tool, you can sit back and enjoy while your UX test is being conducted with real users.
Who uses UXtweak?
UXtweak Pricing Information
UXtweak has a free basic plan that you can use for small projects. The Professional Plan costs 140€/month and the Agency and Enterprise plans are offered with custom prices.
Sources:
https://maze.co/collections/ux-ui-design/tools/
https://www.hotjar.com/ux-design/tools/
https://userguiding.com/blog/ux-tools/
UX Tools
So, start with the tool itself. Chances are, the tool you use has extensive tutorials to guide you every step of the way. This means you’ll save money because you won’t have to take extra courses on how to use a tool.
UX Tools
User experience designers use UX tools—often purpose-built software—at different stages of their work. For example, designers test their assumptions using prototyping software (e.g., Balsamiq) and do usability testing with other software (e.g., Loop11). To stay competitive, brands make UX tools extremely easy to learn.
Throughout the stages of the UX design process designers use tools to help create digital or physical representations of their ideas. “UX tool” may refer to any technology you use this way – be it to apply design principles in prototyping or simply record ideas. At the lower levels, UX tools are basic aids such as the markers, Post-its and whiteboards teams use during brainstorming sessions. Similarly, you use physical UX tools when you do paper prototyping.
At the higher levels, UX tools are the software you use to advance your and your team’s ideas – ranging from free to premium options. You can divide these between software that helps in copywriting (e.g., Grammarly), team collaboration (e.g., Dropbox) and various other types of tools:
What are the best UX research tools?
1. Optimal Workshop for card sorting, tree testing and first-click testing
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2. Lookback for user interviews and usability tests
The collaborative dashboard allows you to sync all your research, tag your teammates, and create highlight reels of all the most useful insights. You can set up virtual observation rooms, record users’ screens as they navigate your app or website, and transcribe your user interviews.
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3. Typeform for surveys
Surveys are a UX research staple, offering a quick, easy and inexpensive way to gather user insights. When sending out surveys for UX research, you’ll usually ask questions about the respondents’ attitudes and preferences in relation to the product or service you’re designing.
Typeform is one of the most popular survey tools among UX designers. With Typeform, you can design your own surveys from scratch or choose from a range of templates. After you’ve distributed your survey, you can see responses and completion rates and generate shareable reports.
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4. Maze for user surveys, concept validation, and wireframe & prototype testing
Main features at a glance:
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Professional Diploma in UX Design
5. UserZoom for surveys, card sorting, click testing, and usability tests
UserZoom is a remote UX research platform for various studies and tests at different stages of the product design process. As such, UserZoom is a handy tool for both informing your design decisions and testing them out.
Similar to Optimal Workshop and Maze, UserZoom is a complete UX research toolbox used for card sorting, usability testing, surveys, click testing, tree testing, and user interviews. The platform also includes a fully-integrated participant recruitment engine with over 120 million users worldwide.
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6. dscout for remote user interviews and diary studies
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7. Hotjar for analytics and heatmaps
You can use Hotjar to send out surveys, capture and watch screen recordings of people interacting with your website, create heatmaps, and gather real-time user feedback. Hotjar is all about stepping into your users’ shoes and improving the user experience accordingly!
Main features at a glance:
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8. Reframer for analysing qualitative research
Reframer is part of the Optimal Workshop suite of UX research tools (number 1 on our list), but we think it’s worth a special mention. As UX designer Carrie Nusbaum notes in her own review of Reframer :
“There are many tools that support the act of actual user testing, and many that facilitate design. Relatively few tools, however, specifically support some important steps that take place in between, namely: data organisation, research synthesis, and presentation of findings.”
Webflow
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Webflow gives you the power to design without knowing HTML or CSS. With drag and drop functionality and an intuitive interface, Webflow gives you the creative freedom to build whatever you imagine. Using Webflow for building a prototype gives you an actual website, and generates accurate HTML and CSS code or JavaScript when implementing micro-interactions. This saves time. Instead of taking what’s been drafted in a prototype and building a design from it, you already have what you need to give to a developer. You can also use a template if you don’t want to start from scratch.
Sources:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-tools
https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/best-ux-research-tools/
https://webflow.com/blog/ui-ux-design-tools
UX Tools
Userlytics is a user testing platform that helps you conduct research at scale by testing digital assets like websites, applications, mobile apps, prototypes, etc. You can collect both qualitative and quantitative data and set up advanced metrics and graphical reports.
A Comprehensive List of the Top 10 UX Research Tools
Building your UX research tool stack is an essential step in establishing an effective research practice. In this chapter, we are rounding up some essential tools that will help you conduct UX research and move the needle in your organization.
UX researchers have access to many different solutions to conduct user research and manage different stages of their workflow. For instance, there are tools for conducting usability testing, surveys, interviews, or more specialized tests, such as card sorting or tree testing.
Other common tools make it easier to document research, take notes, and transcribe interviews. Finally, UX researchers can use specific tools to recruit participants, capture remote or in-person sessions, and generate real-time reports to share with the rest of the team.
Research Tools
UsabilityTools
See the website from the user’s perspective or ask them directly how to improve your service. The platform combines qualitative and quantitative approach. UsabilityTools is integrated with a research panel with access to over 10 million people worldwide. For more details read our review of UsabilityTools.
Woopra
Track, analyze, and take action on live customer data. Woopra helps you to identify the soft spots in your conversion funnel so that you can improve them later on. The information you get allows you to measure marketing initiatives and evaluate the ROI of each.
MouseStats
Watch your website visitors – see all mouse movements, scrolls, key-strokes and clicks as a movie. Thanks to interactive heatmaps you can find out which areas on the page attract more attention and which make users confused. Data on web form visitors help you to understand which fields cause dropouts.
Usabilla
Understand what people think and feel while browsing your site. Usabilla focuses on collecting visual user feedback allowing visitors to answer questions by placing points and notes on top of the design. You will be able to select and compare clicks, and analyze comments within their visual context.
Verify
Collect and analyze user feedback on screens or mockups. You can gather feedback, see what people remember about your design or how they feel about it. Great for testing out the ideas before you implement them.
Naview
Polldaddy
Create surveys and polls in minutes. PollDaddy provides polling widgets for blogs, websites and social networks. Advanced filters allow you to analyze your data more quickly. You can collect responses via your website, e-mail or social media.
TryMyUI
Hear what users are thinking as they use your site. You get a narrated video of each user navigating your website while trying to perform tasks you want. The service allows you to see your website through the eyes of your user. All tests are self-moderated.
Loop11
Improve usability of your website through scenario based tests. This automated service lets you to evaluate web usability with hundreds of users. You can also benchmark against your competitors and see how your website compares.
Attensee
Choose the best design variations of landing pages or marketing materials. Combine tests with classic surveys to understand which design variation does the best use of users’ attention. Best for pre-launch landing page optimization. For more details, read our reviwew of Attensee.
Silverback
Silverback allows Mac users to record screen activity (such as mouse clicks) and hence facilitate guerilla usability testing without having to go through any complex configurations. This is because it makes use of hardware that is already present in your Mac.
UserTesting
Design Tools
Wireframing is an important technique to reduce the cost and risk involved in developing complex interactive systems. It involves building a small scale version of a system in order to acquire essential feedback required to build it.
UXPin
Balsamiq
Mockingbird
Justinmind
Pidoco
MockFlow
Proto.io
Gliffy
Wireframe.cc
Lorem Ipsum Generator
Zoom, GotoMeeting and other video conferencing tools
David Sloan, UX research lead at accessibility consultancy The Paciello Group, often conducts user research with people with disabilities. As there isn’t time or budget for face-to-face usability testing, he has found great value in web conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype for remote evaluation.
“Zoom’s ability to record system audio as well as the participant’s own speech and their screen makes it ideal for remote testing with screen reader users,” he explains. “By setting up a multi-participant call you can also have observers watch and listen and take notes. The fidelity of the recorded audio supports high-quality transcription of the screen reader output and moderator/participant dialogue, which can be used for analysis purposes. For assistive technology users, minimizing demands for additional software to be installed before a remote evaluation is particularly important, and the Zoom interface is pretty accessible.”
Sloan points out that one limitation of web conferencing software is their inability to out-of-the-box broadcast or record a screen as seen when magnification or a high contrast color scheme has been applied. However, in his experience of carrying out research with screen reader users, these tools are ideal, especially for quick, targeted evaluations as a way to inject accessible user experience into an agile development process.
Bekah Rice, senior UX designer/developer and accessibility expert at user experience strategy firm truematter, agrees that video conferencing tools are great to capture tests and share them with observers. In her experience, GoToMeeting is one of the more practical ones.
For Ben Grace, lead UX designer at WordPress-centric digital agency 10up, team collaboration software Miro has become an indispensable tool to plan and prep for research, keep the team organized as they execute, and a great way to socialize their findings.
“Our team has found that having a single place for our work that is visible to the team is very useful, and common in shared physical spaces,” he explains. “However, at 10up, we’re a fully remote team, and Miro has really enhanced how we work. Remote collaboration is always challenging, but we’re able to quickly access and keep our insights in a single space for the full team to view.”
The goal of this workshop is to kickstart the UX design team at 10up on a project and gain internal alignment on activities and deliverables. UX designers use this to outline and estimate activities and deliverables.
Choose a tool that works for you and focus on the users
There are a ton of UX research tools out there, and you’ll need to decide which ones are most suited to your projects and way of working. As user and product research leader Gregg Bernstein points out, the best tools are those already in use by your organization.
“People are creatures of habit — your colleagues included,” he explains. “To make research visible and accessible, keep as much of the research process within their current technological ecosystem. Whether your org uses Slack and Google Drive, or Basecamp and Zoom, there you go: that’s your research toolbox. After six months to a year like this, you’ll know what’s working just fine and what’s ripe for better tooling.”
Lindsey Wallace, senior experience researcher at Adobe, meanwhile, advises to check your ego at the door and remember your participants are the experts: “When running research, I always want my participants to feel like nothing they can say is a ‘wrong answer’ because I’m there to learn about their experiences. This requires patience and the ability to create an environment of trust and safety. User research is a judgement free zone!”
“Ultimately, no tool is a substitute for the expertise of a trained researcher who approaches their work and participants with deep curiosity and leverages literature and other resources in their field to contextualize their insights.”
Sources:
https://maze.co/guides/ux-research/ux-research-tools/
https://usabilitygeek.com/user-experience-ux-tools/
https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/best-ux-research-tools/