Tuts+ Web Design | Joanna Ngai

There’s a big landscape of design tools to choose from, and choosing the right ones isn’t easy. Here are the things to consider as you go about choosing a toolkit for UX design.

The Product

When selecting the
right set of tools, take note of the type of product you’re tackling, the amount
of time you have to create a mock-up and who you’ll be collaborating with.

What designers need from great design tools is the ability to allow work to transition well between teams, whether between a team
of designers, in front of non-designers for review, or for handoff from design
to implementation.

From all the tools available, each one has some overlap in
functionality with the others. There are tools that
specialize for certain platforms and ones that cover mobile, web and experience. Many UX designers work with a range of tools, to cover the gaps or
fit the context for the deliverable they are looking to create.

Other Factors 

Other factors to
consider are:

• Speed (learning ramp for this tool, general speed of output)
• Fidelity required
• Sharing (availability of collaboration features)
• User Testing
• Support documentation
• Mobile/Touch support
• Ability to create complex interactions

One major
consideration for choosing a tool is how easily the design can translate in the
user research/testing phase and whether a designer can create an environment
where design can be validated in front of users. For example, there are tools (such as Marvel and InVision) that allow you to send designs to a device which can facilitate testing for a
mobile app.

In the design
industry, Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) are usually
considered the standard and what most designers will be trained in. However, it
is not uncommon to use alternative tools nowadays to complete the task needed. You’ll find this is more a matter of personal choice, budget, which best fits the product needs, and allows easy sharing with those you’ll be working with.

New Toys

Something that
excites me about the state of design tools today is the influx of new
prototyping tools. Without coding experience, there are visual prototyping
tools available that mimic interaction (Principle App, Flinto, Quartz
Composer, etc.) which is incredibly helpful for showing multi-screen
experiences. It’s exciting for designers to build prototypes that can show
behavior rather than a static screen. Another recent tool is called Figma, which
describes itself as a real time collaborative interface tool. Most designers
work in a team environment and having the ability to iterate on the design in
real time with other designers would be very useful.

Ultimately, as a UX designer
choosing a set of tools, it comes down to your day to day needs, the type of
platform you are designing for and how best to share your work (to the teams
you collaborate with or to users).  

Coming up..

Next up in our rapid-fire UX series we talk about Components of UX. See you there!