Essential UX Design Tools to Boost Your Productivity

Using tools can help streamline tasks such as wireframing and creating design elements that will appear throughout your site. UX design tools create a more usable and easily accessible end product for designers.

The focus is on the person who will utilize the final design and how well that design works for their needs.

Tools simply help you streamline the process of making sure a website is user-friendly and that everything is functioning together optimally. These tools can also boost your productivity because they save time and do the work of several people.

The tools listed in this article were chosen because they are easy to use and are familiar in the design world. They also have positive reviews on a variety of sites or have been used personally by a variety of designers with positive results.

Sketch

Sketch helps with digital image design tasks. The program is made to work with Mac computers and programs like Adobe Photoshop.

This is a fast and easy-to-use image editor made specifically for design work. It works similar to Photoshop but has some features specifically for designers, such as vector shapes that will auto adapt to any changes in layout or sizing.

This app boosts productivity because it saves designers hours of tweaking image size by hand. Each new object is placed on its own layer. All layers can be exported easily and used with other software as needed.

UserTesting

This UX tool allows designers to test the functionality of a design before taking it live. This can help you avoid publishing a site that doesn't work properly.

Broken sites or features that don't work can frustrate users and cause them to flee a website, increasing your bounce rate to an embarrassing level. It is far better to test elements first before you expose site visitors to new features.

You can even pull in others to test your mock site remotely and let you know if they run into any issues. You'll get video updates of what they do and don't like about your overall design.

You can also get feedback from Sketch's research team if you prefer, or you can pull in an expert to coach you through the entire design process and to analyze the usability of your site.

No matter what, you’ll boost your productivity because you’ll be able to find out quickly what elements aren’t working and figure out a way to solve them. This will make you look better to your client since you’ll also avoid any coding issues with your site before taking it live.

Lander

Lander allows you to build a beautiful landing page in minutes. You can use one of the templates on the site and customize it to meet your needs. This will result in a "high-converting landing page."

You could also create a couple different versions for your landing page and easily conduct some A/B testing to see which one has the best conversion rates.

Lander tests across five different points to see which landing page will work best. They study your current content, develop a hypothesis and test for you, measure the results and take action to show you what changes will result in better rates.

Lander saves you the time it would typically take to build landing pages from scratch by streamlining the process. You can even create a Facebook landing page and test different versions.

Optimizely

One of the best ways to see what kind of impact your overall design will have with your target demographic is to test different options and find out the impact the design has on different audiences.

Since the main goal is to get as many conversions as possible with your design, you’ll want to check for different browsers, mobile users, etc.

This software also offers a blog and some guides to help you further develop your site to engage visitors. Learn how to reduce your bounce rate and develop an ongoing relationship with site visitors.

Your time will be well spent because you’ll be able to use A/B testing and analytics to clearly see what works best for your audience.

UX Pin

This tool allows you to create "fully interactive and animated prototypes." You'll get a taste of exactly how your final design will function.

You'll be able to easily work with your layered designs, and the program can integrate with Photoshop or Sketch. You can grab UI elements for desktops and mobile device platforms as well.

Drag and drop, add images, icons and custom elements to your mockup with ease.

Another nice element of UX Pin is that you can share a link to a mockup and collaborate with clients or other people working on the project.

You can even use real-time screen sharing and design on the fly so the other person can see what changes you are making. They’ll be able to request changes or approve the new design on the spot.

Instead of spending days going back and forth on a design and making minor adjustments that can add up to hours of your time, you can design while the client is watching the changes and finalize design ideas quickly.

Usability Tools

Integrating a survey or feedback form into your site can be vital to understanding the overall user experience of people who are actually visiting and using your site on a regular basis.

Usability Tools offers the ability to create a form and discover what does and doesn’t work about your design.

This tool takes testing a step further, too. For example, you might know that people are bouncing away from your site about 1/3 of the way down the page, but you may not fully understand why.

This tool helps you understand the reasons why people are leaving through handy feedback direct from those users.

Spend more time fixing the things that will truly make your site function better because you’ll have the information you need to do so.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg clearly shows you what behavior users engage in via the use of heat maps and confetti reports.

You can analyze where people click on your site and where they don't click. You can also get numbers on how many people scroll down your site and the point at which the majority stop.

In addition, Crazy Egg will show you where your traffic is coming from and their behavior when they get there.

Crazy Egg boosts productivity by showing you what changes you need to make to have maximum impact on those who visit your site. You can easily make changes that target just those bouncing away or that works to engage even more people, in addition to those you already have.

Mockplus

Mockplus is desktop based and can be used to prototype your web apps and mobile apps. It is extremely easy to use, even for those just getting started in design.

You'll gain features like a WYSIWYG interface. If you don't know a lot of coding, you can easily build a mock site without knowing any coding at all.

Features of this software include pre-designed components: over 400 icons and 200 other features. You simply drag and drop these components into your design to create a usable website on the fly.

You can share a QR code to allow clients and other team members to view prototypes. You also can use cloud sync to share with others.

Improve your productivity by checking how the overall design will work before taking it live. Repair bugs and design change requests seamlessly.

Conclusion

There are many tools available to help improve user experience design. The one that works best for you is the one that most closely meets your needs and those of your clients.

Try the tools listed here as a great place to start, but be open to trying out new tools as they are released and developed.

Once you use UX design tools, you'll realize how much more productive your design work can be, and you won't want to be without them.