Having ever been in the real world of design, you know that the tooling debate is never over. There’s a new thing every two months, which promises to change the way you do things, and more than fifty percent of the time it is a new Figma wrapper with a new paint job on it. Having worked on product team, agency, and freelance projects over the years, I have come up with some rather firm opinions on what actually passes the test and what looks good in a demo, but fails the minute a real deadline must be met.
This is not a paid round up. These are the tools that I have used, struggled with, liked and at times wished to throw out of the window.
Figma: Yet the King, though Not devoid of Its Frustrations.
The first is the most obvious one. Figma has taken over the sphere of UI/UX rightfully. The co-editing is truly amazing – the type of feature that is hard to believe until you are on a call with a developer and are both on the same frame live, drawing on the same frame and editing and refining it without emails sent back and forth.
The part system is strong. Once you learn to use auto layout, it is something you can not do without. Added in 2023, variables support finally enabled design tokens to be usable within the tool instead of through documentation alone.
With this said, Figma is not ideal. Complex files can hurt performance, and so can having a couple of heavy prototype flows in operation. The free option has been limited as the planned acquisition by Adobe was unsuccessful, and the charges of smaller groups may be prohibitively high. And the occasional conflict of the plug-ins that silently has somehow gone wrong but without being immediately apparent.
Nevertheless, when beginning to work or starting a team, Figma is the least risky choice. Learning curve is a reality but is worth it.
Adobe XD: It’s Time to Move On.
I understand that Adobe loyalists are going to push back on this but at this point Adobe XD has been forsaken. The updates are only slight, the community has silently emigrated, and the fact that it has been most successfully packaged as a part of the Creative Cloud, which is its biggest selling point, has not helped bring it back to relevance. Already heavily integrated with Adobe and XD is performing well, then that is okay. However, it would not be my choice to construct a new workflow around it in 2024.
Sketch: Still Alive, Still Relevant (In case you run on Mac as well).
Sketch has been unjustly shunned these days, but in the case of team having Mac exclusivity, it is a truly good option. The interface is clean, prototyping has been enhanced with transitions reminiscent of Smart Animate and the library of the plug-in is vast. Sketch Workspaces introduced a web viewer, which will finally make it a little bit easier to share with non-Mac stakeholders.
The actual constraint is platform lock-in. You cannot use Sketch in the first place in case one of your team members is a Windows user. The latter limitation is the only reason why most contemporary teams will gravitate towards Figma.
Framer: The Interface between Design and Real Code.
Framer has had an interesting evolution. What was initially intended to be a code-first prototyping tool has evolved into a bit more of a visual web builder that is capable of having serious design ability. Framer has now become rightfully impressive to the designers who may wish to have interactive prototypes and even fully functioning landing pages without handing them over to a developer.
The component system connects to React at the hood, and ensure that your designs are much closer to production code than most tools provide. In small product teams, or especially in startups, this can bridge the design-development gap in a significant way.
Maze and Useberry: To be used in User Testing.
Design as design is mere decoration. And Maze is now the tool of choice in unmoderated usability testing – you develop your prototype in Figma, integrate with Maze, and have quantitative data of where users have trouble, clicked, or dropped flows. Heat maps, misclicks, time-on-task data – it is the type of feedback that makes the presentation to the stakeholders a lot more persuasive.
Useberry is a good substitute which is typically less expensive and has comparable basic functionality. Considering your budget on testing, both are worth considering.
Zeplin and Handoff Tools.
Zeplin is mostly replaced by a self-developed Figma developer mode which now provides fairly good inspection features. However, Zeplin still offers its benefits in situations when developers require annotated, structured specs without having to browse a full Figma file. It is actually the choice of some development teams due to the lesser cognitive load.
Final Thoughts
The most ideal UI/UX tool is the tool that your team will use on a regular basis. Changing tools to find the ideal workflow is a trap – each hour of file-moving is an hour of not designing. Take one thing that is stable, get to know it and use it well and enrich it with specialized tools where your foundation platform is really lacking.
More likely than not in 2024, it will consist of Figma as your main tool, Maze or Useberry to do the testing, and ProtoPie when your prototyping requires acting like actual products. All the other is a situational thing.
FAQs
Q: Does Figma have a free plan?
A: Figma provides a free plan that has restricted projects and capabilities. Plans begin at approximately $12-15 per editor/month, which is cumulative when dealing with a large staff.
Q: Which is the most user-friendly tool to work with in UI/UX?
A: Figma is the best place to start because it has the most community resources, templates and usage by the industry.
Q: Is it possible to conduct UX research within Figma?
A: Other integrated tools that allow basic usability testing are available, such as Maze, but Figma is not a research-based tool. Test it with specific test tools.
Q: Do we still want to learn Adobe XD?
A: No, in general, in 2024 Adobe has diminished development, and the community has mostly moved past it.
Q: How is UI and UX tools different?
A: UI tools are concerned with interface designs and layouts. UX tools involve the entire process such as research, wireframing, prototyping and testing. A lot of contemporary tools such as Figma attempt to fulfill both.
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