10 Helpful User Experience Tools for Every Designer

User experience designer is the person who responsible for improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product. It is important for UX designers to master several skills: user research, prototyping design, user testing and design collaboration. Below, I have listed some of the best user experience tools that will improve your design productivity based on these four categories:

User Research — help with understanding user behaviours, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.
Design — prototyping allows you to see early on if your app works properly or not as well as examine possible weaknesses in its design and functionality.
User Testing — help discover problems or bottle-necks in your design.
Design Collaboration — smooth the design process and simplify communication with your team members and stakeholders.

1. Sketch

According to founder Pieter Omvlee, Sketch was designed as an image editor for digital design. It is made specifically for Mac OS X users to design interfaces, websites and icons. Sketch works largely like Photoshop and Illustrator, but with more flexibility for UX designers.
Sketch’s Vector shapes easily adapt to changing styles, sizes and layouts, allowing UX designers to avoid a lot of painful hand-tweaking. Every new object is automatically affixed to a new layer, which allow creative combinations and easier navigation. You can also export your layers very easily out of Sketch with one click.
Cost
$99

2. Mockplus

This is a desktop based user experience tool can be used to prototype for mobile, desktop and web apps quickly. With a singular goal to make the complex simple, Mockplus is an increasingly popular choice, especially for those focused on UX design.

New features in Mockplus 3.2:

UI flow design mode: Intelligent connections between pages which can be adjust manually

Repeater: Create repeated elements quickly with drag-and-drop.

Demo Projects and Templates: Various built-in templates help you to build your prototypes on them, easy and fast.

Sketch Import — Publish selected Sketch Artboards as a Team Project in Mockplus.

Because of the ease of use, the first-time users can master it in a very short time without programming knowledge. One of the flash-points of Mockplus is the visualized interaction design, that’s What You See Is What You Get. You could build lifelike prototypes without any coding, making it a breeze. For example, with just two clicks, you can make a button have one reaction when mouse down and another reaction when the cursor moves over it. If you are looking for a UX tool that is cheap and allows to create interactive prototypes in a minimum of time, Mockplus is an ideal solution you should not miss out on.
Cost
Basic- free forever
Pro- $29/month （billed monthly）

XMind is a popular mind mapping tool. Millions of people use XMind to clarify thinking, manage complex information, run brainstorming and get work organized. This “mind mapping” software lets users list out with at-a-glance comprehension a project’s goals, threats, schedule, progress, requirements — anything, really, that free up your head space just by getting it down somewhere. XMind relies on visuals for quick comprehension, and lets you customize how you outline goals, progress, requirements, and problems.
Cost
Free edition — free forever
Plus -$79
Pro — $99

4. UsabilityTools

UsabilityTools is one of the most widely used UX tools for applying in-page visual analytics across websites and web apps. UsabilityTools helps you empathize with your users and shows you what’s working and what’s not, and most importantly, why. It allows you know what behaviors are tied to conversions or customer struggle. UsabilityTools lets you build customized behavior flows to see how users progress through your conversion funnel.
Cost
Trial-14 days
Pro — start at $19/month

5. Marvel

Marvel is a web-based app for simple design, prototyping and collaboration. It allows you not only to design user interface and icons with Marvel Canvas, but also to upload screens from local, Dropbox and Google Drive to add “hot spots”. With just a few clicks, you can link the screens together and turn your designs into interactive mobile and web prototypes.
Cost
Basic-free forever
Pro-start at $15/month

Also Check: Top 10 Tools for Examining the UX of Your Website Design

6. Slack

With the slogan “team communication for the 21st century,” Slack is a collaborative tool for keeping it all together. Slack gathers the most common communication tools like Google Drive, Twitter or Dropbox in one place, so the entire team is kept up-to-date. One of the essential features for UX designer is the ability to organize your team conversations in open channels. You can make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything — significantly save time on communication between co-workers.
Cost
Free edition- free forever
Standard — $6.67/month

7. UserTesting

Bad experiences on websites and apps, and in the real world, aren’t just frustrating for customers, they’re costing companies millions of dollars a year. User Testing make it easy for you to get on-demand feedback by recruiting users, administering the test remotely, and presenting you the results in an hour. You will get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use, together with written answers to the questionnaire that you have set. The service works for landing pages, emails, ad, prototypes, live sites, and apps. You can opt to have your test designed by an experienced in-house research team, or have a project manager come on to oversee that you accomplish your goals.
Cost
Basic — $99 per video ($49 per video for your first 10 videos)

8. Optimizely

Optimizely, like UserTesting, makes it easy to test and personalize your website and mobile app. However, Optimizely focuses on one specific type of test, A/B testing, so that designers can see how tweaking an interface will affect conversions.

9. Stylify Me

Stylify Me was created by Annabelle Yoon and Michael Mrowetz to help designers quickly gain an overview of the style guide of a site, including colors, fonts, sizing and spacing.
This tool allows the designer to research sites efficiently without the need to inspect each element, in order to be aware of current design trends and inform their own design decisions.

10. Color Safe

Color Safe was created by Donielle Berg and Adrian Rapp to help designers select color combinations that allow users to read their content regardless of different visual capabilities and screen resolutions.

Tools in the field of user experience design are increasing every day and there is no best one, it depends on your needs. What’s your favorite UX tool? Feel free to try out these tools and leave your comments in the section below.

Originally published at codecondo.com on May 19, 2016.