
* for UX Designers
Note: This is an old article selling an older version of our product which, at the time, was subscription-based. We have since changed our business model to a one-time purchase price. I will keep this article live because I still feel strongly about the points I’m trying to make, but just know that if you visit our site that you will see products with fixed prices, not subscription pricing.
Picture this. You’re tasked with redesigning a clunky business application to “make it pop”. Or better yet, maybe you get to design it from scratch…what a treat!
You’ve done your research and you’ve assembled a few wireframes and workflow diagrams. Your stakeholders have a vague idea what it should look like, and it’s up to you to paint the vision to get buy-in, and to help development get a better idea of just how difficult you’re about to make their lives for the next 6 months. Yet there you sit, staring at a blank canvas like a first-year art student, nervously eying your calendar and mentally calculating just how much time you have left before D-Day…delivery day, that is.

You scour Dribbble. You find some amazing designs and actually start to get excited. Animated GIFs! Unrealistically attractive profile photos! Music apps! Weather Apps! Facebook, Reimagined…again! More Music Apps! You’re sitting on a goldmine of inspiration, but trying to piece things together feels like shopping every antique store in the city trying to find furniture in the exact color, style, and dimensions for your swanky new ̶l̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶r̶o̶o̶m̶ ̶u̶r̶b̶a̶n̶ ̶l̶o̶f̶t̶ studio apartment.
Enter UI Kits
They’re gorgeous. Hundreds of screens, beautifully designed and just waiting to be picked apart. This one is perfect! No wait, this one! You download a couple free ones. Hell, you might even shell out some money for a premium kit. Suddenly, that deadline isn’t looking so daunting after all.
Just when you think you have the tools you need to get started mocking up your vision, the veneer starts to wear off like a $25 IKEA coffee table. For a .sketch file with so much style, it wasn’t built with styles at all! Go figure.
You spend days tweaking the the visuals to match your brand. You create text styles and object styles and symbols to make sure your work is consistent across every screen in your app. But as the hours pile up, self-doubt creeps in. It’s not looking nearly as polished as you wanted, and worse, you’ve spent more time editing what you paid for than if you had simply started from scratch.
You’ve spent all night preparing ingredients, but dinner service is already over.
Reasons UI Kits don’t work for UX design:
- They lack consistency: Resource files don’t support consistency. I have yet to see a UI kit that actually uses what Sketch is good at: Layers, Symbols, and Styles. Kits that advertise dozens (even hundreds!) of screens aren’t that helpful when you have to manually edit each screen, regroup disorganized layers, and create symbols yourself.
- They’re not very build-able: There are more UI Kits with impossible visual effects than I can count on my clammy designer fingers. Can developers actually code this? UI Kits set you up for disappointment when development favors function over cheeky button effects. In the world of UX, you’re judged on your ability to design applications that actually make it into the hands of your users. The most beautiful Dribbble shot in the world is meaningless collecting dust on a shelf without so much as a single line of code written.
- They favor mobile design: Yep, everything is mobile these days. But many of us UX designers are still doing web-based desktop design and that’s not changing any time soon. Where are the UI Kits for web apps? Where they do exist, desktop UI kits are rarely scalable
- They’re just pretty: To be frank, UI Kits aren’t built by UX designers. They’re created by visual designers, dare I say, for the ❤️’s and 👍🏼’s. But UX designers are responsible for designing applications that are polished and technically feasible. Design efficiencies are paramount in an environment where product requirements are ever-changing, so time should be spent optimizing the workflow, not creating symbols and text styles.
Sketch has become one of the premier applications for designing digital products, and when used correctly and in conjunction with plugins, can be an absolute powerhouse for UX and product designers alike.
After years of designing thousands of screens for clients, I’ve come to value process efficiencies far more than my Dribbble buckets. Every minute saved in execution time is money earned in project margins.
Check out what we’re calling UX Power Tools. Yes, it’s a UI kit (ironic, given the article above), but one built and designed with growth and scaling top-of-mind. Styles, symbols, and smart components which always stay in sync, no matter how many updates or changes you make.
When I’m not goofing off on Medium, I’m working on Sketch tools at UX Power Tools to make you a better, faster and stronger designer. Follow us on Twitter @uxpowertools. Follow me too 😇