UI/UX Designer Tools (Free)
Maybe one of you still have curiousity about what UI/UX Designer use for simply their work. Some of them absolutely use non-free software which is it can be one time payment software or subcribe payment, but in this article i will share free software that you can use for making some design/prototype/wireframe. Personally i recommended this website for you:
Invisionapp
What is Invision?
Created for designers, by designers, InVision is a prototyping, collaboration and workflow tool. InVision gives you clarity, collaboration, and control of everything you need to power your design process. It allows you to efficiently and simply create interactive mockups for your wireframes and designs. When you have completed adding all the pages and elements to your prototype you can then share it with your team or clients for feedback.
What makes Invision truly great is that you can share your mockups ‘live’ with your audience or create tour points which guide your users through a model of their site, allowing them to interact with the model as if it were a functioning website or app, giving you vital feedback. When it comes to providing feedback, your users have a multitude of options! They can share it real-time on the screen, leave comments on each page, or even remark upon specific elements.
This makes presenting your wireframes and designs a real experience, vastly improving upon sending out a dozen PDFs or screenshots with each transition or hover effect displayed in a separate image, a clunky process that often results in clients getting confused about why certain buttons are coloured differently than the others (or wondering why the drop-down navigation menu is stuck).
Whimsical
Identified by its creators as “The Visual Workplace”, Whimsical is primarily useful for creating wireframes, flowcharts and sticky note boards. A free account will allow up to 4 boards a month, with the paid packages being a quite reasonable $12 per user, per month and unlimited boards or $10 per user, per month when paid as a yearly subscription.
Having come from a background of using Figma and Sketch for wireframing previously, I was able to jump into Whimsical with very little learning curve. It consists of a simple UI for creating new boards which also allows categorization via Folders of those boards. Folders can be set to Private or Shared for all within an account. Boards can also be shared publicly, if preferred, which we use frequently when collaborating with clients.
The board interface allows me to name the board itself, manage my personal settings, search the board contents, view all comments and has extensive options for sharing and exporting the board view.
The Comments feature is optionally turned on and has become incredibly useful for getting client feedback (at their leisure) on wireflows as well as developer feedback and questions. Comments can be added to specific points in the UI making it clear which comment goes with which element as well as replied to via a thread format and marked as Resolved if need be. Resolved comments are removed but can be toggled on optionally as well.
Figma
Figma is a vector graphics editor and prototyping tool which is primarily web-based, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The Figma Mirror companion apps for Android and iOS allow viewing Figma prototypes on mobile devices.
