Any design, no matter how good, will be completely useless if it’s not UX design. There are thousands of resources that create a mind-blowing interface and graphic design and use the top professionals, but they can’t get a proper place on the web. That happens because the interaction between the website UX and users is growing exponentially, which means that to find user feedback, web designers or user experience consultants need to take care of the user experience (UX means “User Experience”). It is at this stage when UX design tools come to help. These are excellent online services that provide tips regarding the creation of user interfaces for designers. In this article, we will talk about such tools.

UX Design Tools For Modeling and Designing Mockups and Prototypes

Prototyping has become a necessity for all designers who want to succeed in UX design and user experience improvement. Creating mockups, models, and prototypes allows them to test any ideas in action before investing time, effort, and money into the project. With these UX design tools, you can test the product throughout the whole production process and make improvements to create a reliable user interface for your target audience. To be sure visual elements of your UX design look professional, you should address FixThePhoto company.

Moqups Interface Design Tool

The Moqups isana HTML5 application is designed for creating layouts, mockups, and prototypes. Moqups provides many blanks and templates that you can use to create the foundation for your project. You can customize each element and set your own colors, text size, icons, etc.

Wireframe

This is another tool for creating wireframing pages with a user-friendly, minimalist interface. The tool is easy to use and includes only the bare minimum of features, which makes using it as easy as possible. Creating diagrams with this tool is also convenient because users can easily share them with others. Each diagram or mockup you create gets its own unique URL, which you can send to the customer or to other team members.

Pencil

This is a tool for creating graphical prototypes. Since it is an open-source tool, you can install it on your PC and create graphical prototypes even without the Internet connection. Of course, you shouldn’t expect advanced features and complex functionality from it, but it can handle its basic tasks quite well.

Balsamiq

If you don’t want to spend hours creating prototypes, you should just try Balsamiq. It’s simple but quite effective when it comes to prototyping. With Balsamiq, users can create multiple layouts to test and choose the one that provides the best result.

PowerMockup

Are you a PowerPoint expert? Then you’ll love this tool as it will turn your PowerPoint program into a powerful UX design tool for creating layouts. This means you won’t have to learn any new software at all. PowerMockup allows people with no special technical skills to participate in the design and development process, which is definitely one of its main advantages. Just make sure you have a monitor with high color accuracy or other people might see different colors on your mockups, potentially ruining the hard work you put into your designs

Mockplus

Mockplus has everything you need for your next project, from great visualized interaction, built-in 200 components, and 3,000 icons to collaborative editing and real-time testing on real devices. This UI design tool helps you efficiently and effortlessly turn your ideas into fully functional prototypes. Moreover, the Mockplus design tool provides a balance between ease of use and sophisticated features to create any element of the prototype.

UXPin

Need a tool that allows you to create interactive prototypes and layouts? UXPin is a user-friendly and easy-to-use tool that will help you get an idea of how the product will look on mobile devices just by switching your browser screen size.

Solidify

This is a powerful and feature-rich tool for creating layouts and mockups. Solidify allows you to test prototypes on multiple devices such as PC, tablets, and smartphones. With this tool, you can create prototypes and test them with real users who can share their feedback about the products. You can use a mockup, or layout to create interactive prototypes and then ask users to perform some actions with it. Thus, you will see how they interact with the prototype and if there are extra elements that distract users’ attention from the main action.

Gliffy

Gliffy isn’t just another UX design tool for prototyping; it’s so much more. Gliffy allows users to create network diagrams, complex technical drawings, flowcharts, UML diagrams, and more. Its user-friendly interface allows you to create diagrams within minutes.

POP

Converting your ideas into a working prototype that people can actually test and share their feedback is a time-consuming task. POP is designed to help you with that challenging task. With this tool, you can immediately create a working prototype based on blanks and simplify such a complex process of creating it by hand.

A/B Testing Tools

The idea behind these tools is to create two versions of one page and then test them to see which version performs better. Conversion rates, average time spent on the page, and other measures are some of the things to use if you want to evaluate a website’s page performance.

Desinion

If you’re not sure whether you’re creating a project that users really want to see, with this A/B testing tool, you can ask any question you want and get a real response from users. The tool has a very useful discussion feature to engage users in the design process. Moreover, you can create private discussions and share them with your friends or colleagues only.

Visual Website Optimizer

It’s a simple but really powerful tool that allows you to perform A/B testing at the highest level. With it, you can perform multi optional and split testing. Segmented reports and revenue analysis will also be available in Visual Website Optimizer.

Optimizely

It is a reliable A/B testing tool that allows users to run a test without knowing technical details and without having any special skills. It’s very popular with marketers as well as it requires no code and provides full visual editing.

Tools For Usability Testing

When you want to create a good UX design, you may need usability testing tools to help you understand the users’ experience, their needs, and psychology. If you can determine what visitors and potential customers really want and build an interface based on that knowledge, you are sure to impress them with the design. UX usability testing tools can be roughly divided into remote usability testing tools and feedback tools.

Loop11

Loop11 is a simple usability testing tool that doesn’t require knowledge of HTML code or programming languages. With its help, you can use ready-made templates or create a theme yourself. Moreover, there are several ways to invite users to test your projects. You can create your own list of them based on social media infographics   or create a popup on your site to find interested people. All you have to do is create a list of questions, or include different designs to choose from, and then send out an invitation to people asking them to respond. Based on the results, you can make all the necessary design changes.

Crazy Egg

This tool helps you make the page more usable and increase conversion rates by creating the right user experience. It works like this: you suggest your design, and then, usability and user experience professionals analyze it and share comments that can help you improve your website.

Usability Tools

It’s one of the most widely used UX design tools, which has gained enormous popularity among designers and marketers thanks to its useful features. This tool helps analyze website pages from the user’s point of view. This is a huge advantage for the designer as it gives specific clues as to where and what changes the designer should make to increase conversions or what elements to move to push the user to take certain actions. This usability tool also allows for feedback from people who actually use the product.

UXCam

This is “experience analytics software” to track the activity of app users. This tool will help you get valuable data about how they interact with the application. The “User Recording” feature of this tool is the most impressive. It records user activities and thus gives you a great insight into their behavior. It’s a useful tool to improve the overall performance of your app and increase conversions.

Attensee

It’s a user behavior tracking tool that helps you understand how your target audience views pages on your site. Attensee provides a visual indication of whether people notice important elements of your website. This is directly related to design, as if you find that many users are not actually focusing on important elements such as banners, call to action buttons, special offers, Attensee can help you fix this.

UserVoice

It’s another powerful tool that can help you view and analyze various user actions while they are browsing your site. With this tool, you can get direct feedback from real users and fix the problems they experience.

MouseStats

As you could have guessed by the name, MouseStats helps you keep track of what users do with their mouse as its movements mimic eye movements. As you probably know, mouse movements mimic users’ eye movements. Tracking cursor movements and scrolling will give you important clues as to how users interact with the design. The best thing about this tool is that it provides a visual representation of user activity and thus helps you make necessary changes.

UX Design Tools For Prototyping and Collaborative Design

Developing a good UX design for your target audience is impossible without teamwork. If you’re used to working in teams, you need to have appropriate tools that can help your team members collaborate and make their own suggestions efficiently and effortlessly. Let’s now talk about UX design tools for prototyping and collaborative design that you may find useful.

FileSquare

It’s not just a collaborative tool. With its help, you can create an interactive prototype and collaborate with other team members at the same time. Make creative decisions and get real-time feedback from people.

Notism

If you’re working on visual content or content marketing and looking for a collaboration tool, you need Notism. It uses thumbnails and notes, thus making communicating with your team as easy as possible. Notifications come in real time, so you can get feedback from colleagues and customers as soon as someone puts them in the notes. It can also be used as an content curation tool

Red Pen

RedPen helps make collaborative design and prototyping quick and easy. It’s specifically designed to make collaborative work with graphic content easier. Sharing feedback is very simple: if the users want to highlight any of the elements and leave a note, they just have to hover over it. After that, a small text box appears where you can leave your feedback.

Memosort

Distance is no longer an obstacle if you use Memosort. This amazing tool is one of the best tools for collaborative design. It will help you connect with your team and collaborate in real time. All notes in Memosort are automatically saved, so you don’t have to worry that some good idea or suggestion might be lost.

Trello

You can forget about long and boring emails, as Trello is here to simplify team communication. Moreover, this tool is free. There are special cards inside Trello marking different projects. To add people to a project, you should drag and drop it onto the appropriate card. The tool is also updated in real time.  Trello was purchased by Atlassian and continues to improve the tool to help you be productive. Our friends, Print Peppermint use Trello to manage thousands of orders of custom business cards every month.

Invision

This is an interesting combination of collaborative and prototyping tools. You can use it to create interactive prototypes and models. Invision provides real-time collaboration. All you have to do is send a link of the design to other team members, and they can also work on it and make suggestions.

About the Author

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Mirko Humbert

Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.