Hiring a UX agency to design your product or service is always a serious investment. User experience is something you shouldn’t dismiss in this day and age. Instead, you should make sure that your product or service provides your audience with the ultimate experience while providing solutions for the end-users’ needs.
The question is, how do you find a UI/UX design agency that meets your needs and can provide you with the solutions relevant for your particular business. What should you look for in an agency? Among other things, when interviewing your potential design contractors, you may ask them about the tools they use to provide their clients with appropriate UI/UX design solutions.
There are many tools out there, and some are better than the other. It may be rather hard for you to know what’s right or not if you don’t work in design. Hence, we have made a list of the top 5 tools for UX design. If a UX agency can provide you with relevant services, they will either use some of these tools or at least will know about them. The final tool selection usually depends on the project specifics, and a competent agency will explain why did they go with a specific tool.
Tool #1. InVision
When it comes to product design, InVision takes the lead. Many consider it a perfect tool for small teams and individual designers in its basic form, while the Enterprise edition of this tool is excellent for large organizations, even those that span across multiple departments. In other words, InVision has all UI/UX designers might need when designing a digital product.
As of usability testing, InVision allows testing prototypes right on users’ gadgets. You can also record user interactions, see their faces, and hear their voices, which are usually quite tricky to acquire even though they represent essential feedback data.
While there, InVision also has other advantages, it’s one of the most commonly used UX tools used by agencies, because it’s highly functional and customizable. Just so you understand the practical value of the instrument, companies such as IBM, Apple, General Motors, Verizon, and even Disney, actively use it.
Tool #2. Proto.io
Proto.io is a tool that provides a quick and effective way of building high-grade interactive prototypes. At the same time, it doesn’t require the user to code. The software includes native Windows mobile, Android, and iOS UI elements. It also allows importing individual design elements and designs into it.
Proto.io also provides a great communication feature that will help teams to stay in touch at any given moment. In other words, this tool is one of the top players in the industry.
There are quite a few large corporations that crossed paths with Proto.io. Some of the prominent representatives of the global market using this tool include Big Fish Games, Team One, IDEO, and Digital Management, LLC (DMI), among other companies.
Tool #3. PowerMockup
PowerMockup is what it sounds like – it allows creating great mockups of digital products and services. Some even dub it the perfect UI/UX tool for the creation of mockups and wireframes for desktop and mobile apps as well as websites.
The uniqueness of this tool lies in the fact that you can take icons and shapes from its library and drag them right onto a PowerPoint slide to see how they stack up together.
PowerMockup doesn’t restrict designers to the default designs in its library. Users can add custom elements to the database and make use of them, too. It’s a handy and practical prototyping tool, which is pretty much why UI/UX designers like it.
There are quite a few world-famous companies taking advantage of PowerMockup. They include Samsung, Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), Intel, Fujitsu, Amazon, and HP, among others.
Tool #4. Figma
Figma is a browser-based tool that allows designing, prototyping, and collaborating using the same workspace. Designers love this tool because it lets them combine layers, scale designs, use vectors, and do many other operations without hassle.
In other words, Figma is a simple tool, when it comes to its use, but is incredibly complex in its contents and features, allowing taking care of multiple tasks within the same framework. Designers can use it to create and share resource libraries, which makes it very useful in boosting the prototyping process.
Slack, Twitter, Windows, Dribbble, Dropbox, and Volvo are some of the companies that use Figma for their design needs.
Tool #5. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is rich in features that provide designers with solutions in everything from element creation to prototyping. It also lets users test their designs. The tool is excellent for designing mobile and web apps, as well as websites and other digital products.
One other thing about Adobe XD that UI/UX designers particularly enjoy is that it can be integrated with other Creative Cloud applications, thus providing its users with an even more comprehensive range of possibilities through different tools.
Adobe XD is known to be used by Microsoft, Ancestry, DICE, and Equinox, among other brands.
Conclusion
While this list doesn’t include all of the relevant tools, as there are much more than just five (Sketch, Balsamiq, and Composite to name a couple more), it still provides you an idea of what a reliable UX design team should focus on when designing for their clients. There are also other things that matter, such as skills and process, so make sure to dig deep when interviewing UX agencies you consider hiring.