A digital product’s aesthetic experience is the main emphasis of user interface (UI) design. It includes all of the hues, typefaces, and visuals you see on the screen as well as the UI components you use to move about the interface, such as buttons, scrollbars, and swiping gestures. To provide a great user experience, good UI design is necessary.
So, you should have some dependable UI designing tools in your toolkit if you’re a digital designer of any type. The top 9 UI design tools are all listed in this guide. Here are detailed characteristics of each so you can quickly decide which tools are the greatest fit for your requirements.
1. UXPin:
UXPin is a well-liked UX and UI tool that is utilized by both beginning and seasoned designers. Another end-to-end software that can produce sophisticated, interactive prototypes without requiring coding knowledge is UXPin.
You should have no trouble navigating the UXPin interface if you’re already comfortable with Sketch or Photoshop. It not only has tens of thousands of ready-to-use design elements, but it also has all the tools necessary to support the development and administration of sound design systems.
Key features:
- High-fidelity interactions may be created by dragging interactive elements into your designs.
- There are built-in libraries for iOS, Google Material Design, Bootstrap, and User Flows that are stocked with interactive components, colors, text styles, and free vector icons that are ready to use.
- Developer handoff made easier with downloaded design requirements.
- Make sure your designs are as inclusive and accessible as possible by using the built-in contrast analyzer and color blindness simulator.
- You may utilize the built-in user flow features to help you convey the tale of your job.
2. Sketch:
A vector graphics tool called Sketch is used for sketching, wireframing, prototyping, and design handoff—basically, anything you need to make your designs come to life.
Sketch is a strong and adaptable UX and UI design software made for teamwork. It has long been regarded as a standard industry tool that is suitable for both beginning and seasoned designers. Keep in mind, though, that Sketch is only supported by macOS.
Key features:
- Your designs may be scaled to fit any screen size because of the infinite design canvas, flexible Artboards, design presets, adaptable grids, and simple scaling tools.
- For unrestricted flexibility over your interface typography, use variable and OpenType fonts.
- Flexible and iterative design is made possible by editable boolean operations and intuitive vector editing tools.
- To expedite the design process, use shorthand and mathematical operators.
- Tools that span platforms for real-time sharing, collaboration, and developer handoff
3. Marvel:
Marvel offers to provide you with all the fundamental tools you need to create and develop digital goods, such as wireframing, prototyping, and design specifications for handoff. And because of its user-friendly and straightforward platform, it’s the best UX/UI design tool for novices.
You do not need to install or download anything to use Marvel because it is a web-based solution that operates in the browser. It offers capabilities for wireframing, UI design, and prototyping and was created for quick, straightforward design. To speed up your process, Marvel also interfaces with a wide variety of other well-known design tools.
Key features:
- Using a design handoff tool, developers can quickly convert designs into code, specifications, and assets.
- Wireframe templates for short, early designs that may be moved around
- To acquire opinions on your concepts and verify your designs, built-in user testing capabilities are available.
- Confluence, Jira, Maze, Lookback, and more integrations
- The choice of importing static designs from different tools (e.g. Sketch)
4. Adobe XD:
Another comprehensive vector-based UI tool with features for group design and prototyping is Adobe XD. Many people regard Adobe XD as their preferred design software. There isn’t much you can’t accomplish with it because it is quick, strong, and versatile.
The whole UX and UI design process will be guided by Adobe XD, from initial ideas and low-fidelity concepts to stunning animations and realistic prototypes. In comparison to Sketch, Adobe XD has a modest advantage because it is a component of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite and is compatible with both Windows and Mac.
Key features:
- Voice prototyping allows you to integrate voice-enabled features, add speech playback, and develop voice commands.
- Drag-and-drop vector editor with infinite artboards and intelligent guidelines that assist you in aligning various objects and components in your designs.
- You may share advanced approaches, CSS code snippets, and downloadable materials with developers using the Design Specs tool to speed up the handoff process.
- States and components for scalable iterative design. You may avoid the laborious process of manually replicating and executing changes by using components, which operate naturally to rapidly push changes across whole designs or documents.
- Through the use of 3D transforms, you may replicate object depth and perspective in your designs.
- Strong animation capabilities, including the playing videos and Lottie, micro-animations, motion effects, scroll groups, and anchor connections.
5. Zeplin:
Zeplin is a cloud-based application that connects front-end developers with UX/UI designers. It offers a structured environment where you can submit your ideas and provide specifications, assets, and code snippets for a seamless developer handoff.
UX and UI designers collaborate closely with developers, who write the code that turns your designs into actual, working websites and apps. Therefore, it’s crucial to provide developers with the technical information they require for them to create your ideas exactly as you imagine them.
Zeplin handles the entire process for you; all you have to do is submit your final designs on the platform and choose the platform you’re developing for (for example, web, iOS, or Android) to produce the required assets.
Key features:
- There are connections with Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Photoshop, Slack, and other services.
- Global Styleguides to centrally organize and change the colors, font styles, and other elements of your design system
- Extensions for Swift, XML, HTML, CSS, React Native, and more languages.
- Flows to rapidly and simply record your designs and map user journeys.
6. Figma:
Figma is frequently mentioned in lists of UX/UI tools, and with good cause. An efficient, collaborative process is made possible using the browser-based interface design tool Figma, which enables quick design and prototype.
The vector graphics software Figma is comparable to Sketch and Adobe XD. If you’re searching for a tool that can do it all, from brainstorming to an interactive prototype, wrapped up in a pleasantly user-friendly design, Figma is perfect.
If you decide to use Figma, be sure to also check FigJam, Figma’s online whiteboard tool for workshops, brainstorming, and collaborative ideation.
Key features:
- Vector Networks and a contemporary pen tool that let you draw in any way.
- Integrated commenting features for a team-based design process.
- Animated GIFs, dynamic overlays, and complex transitions are some aspects of interactive prototyping.
- Easy responsive design using Auto Layout.
- Plugins that help you with your design job.
- Drag and drop readily available libraries with ready-made materials into your design files.
7. Origami Studio:
A free design tool developed by Facebook is called Origami Studio. It serves as a primary prototype tool, allowing designers to quickly create and share feature-packed.
Origami Studio, which was first created for Facebook designers, is now accessible to macOS users without charge. We wouldn’t advise using it as your primary UX/UI design tool because it’s a sophisticated tool with a somewhat high learning curve. But it’s worth taking into account experienced designers who want to make lifelike prototypes.
Key features:
- The Patch Library is a database with a complete listing of all patches and their descriptions.
- The drag-and-drop canvas allows you to alter shape layers, text, and pictures that you’ve imported from Sketch or Figma.
- The viewer panel lets you watch, play with, and record your prototype.
- Using “patches,” a sort of block found in the Patch Editor, you may give your prototype interactivity and animation.
- Select a layer and modify its attributes using the inspector.
- List of the layers that make up your prototype, or layer list. You may add additional layers and interactions to various layers of your prototype in this panel.
8. InVison Studio:
InVision Studio bills itself as the world’s most powerful screen design tool, offering everything you need to create, wireframe, prototype, and animation to perfection.
Studio, which is part of the InVision suite of integrated design tools, includes an easy-to-use vector-based sketching tool, an endless canvas, and a slew of remarkable quick prototyping options and built-in animations.
It’s one of the most famous UX/UI tools for professional designers, and it’s accessible on both macOS and Windows.
Key features:
- Rapid prototyping capabilities with fluid interactions, mirroring for mobile devices, and immediate playback
- For developers, the Inspect tool generates pixel-perfect specifications.
- shared components libraries with real-time updates and global synchronization to guarantee design coherence
- A vector-drawing program for quick screen design.
- Adaptable design with an adaptive layout, which lets you fast and simply scale and resize your designs to match any screen size.
- Automatic layer linking, smart-swipe transitions, and timeline editing are all built-in animation features.
9. Uizard:
For people who desire to build digital products but may not have extensive design knowledge, Uizard is a UI design platform. This all-inclusive UX and UI tool allows for brainstorming, low-fidelity wireframing, quick prototyping, UI style, and in-the-moment collaboration.
The website for Uizard claims that it has a very short learning curve and that anybody who can use Google Slides, Keynote, or Powerpoint can use it with ease.
Key features:
- When contemplating the user experience of your product from a distance, wireframe mode, which enables you to render your project in low-fidelity, is excellent.
- Design quickly for mobile and the web using drag-and-drop elements and templates.
- The ability to import wireframes made using other programs as well as hand-drawn ones on paper. Your imported wireframes will be converted into customizable digital displays using Uizard.
Final Thoughts:
We’ll talk about several wireframing, UI designing, and prototyping-based user interface design techniques in the mentioned post. We can select the best UI design tools for a certain application by taking into account factors like the design components, ease of use, cost, and tool fidelity, among others. For software developers to create a top-notch user interface (UI) for the program, user interface design tools are crucial.
