Starting out as a designer? Want to do better at designs? Here are 12 Critical Tools Every Product Designer Needs
Product designing is an art. And like every artist, a Product designer need to use the right tools to bring out your best work. Because in the end, no matter how brilliant the idea is, you’re only as good as your tools. Principally, the telltale of an artist is reflected by the sophistication of the tools in his toolbox.
As a product designer, there are various stages and processes through which you must pass before a design is ready for user consumption. Each stage of the design process requires specific tools to guarantee perfect results.
We’d be reviewing some of the top tools to use at any level of the design process.
P.S: Many of these tools have collaborative features which are great pluses when working in a team.
For Inspiration
Balsamiq
Product design requires that you have access to tools that will not only help you save time, but also help you produce your best work. For Wireframing, a low-tech pen and pencil would have been the most effective tool but for its inability to ensure effective collaboration and communication within a team.
Balsamiq is an excellent tool that gives a perfect blend between a pencil and pen output and the collaboration and creativity required for Wireframing. It is a low-fidelity Wireframing tool with exceptional features that enable team members to create Wireframing on the fly.
Balsamiq makes collaboration simple and easy while also providing support for exporting Wireframes in PDF and PNG formats. Its penchant for saving time and ability to provide a platform to add value early in the development remains its biggest advantage.
Page Flows
Every product manager looks to maximize the user experience on a website. Achieving this requires more than only figuring out what pages go on each page. You must as well ensure that those pages flow together if not they risk running into very serious problems down the road.
Generally, there are two kinds of page flow that product managers look to optimize – site flow and user flow. Although often regarded interchangeably, they’re not the same because they affect the overall user experience at different levels.
Page Flows is a tool you can leverage to manage and optimize site and user flow for a top-notch user experience. The tool contains an extensive wealth of user flow videos and screenshots from different brands. With it, you are guaranteed guidance every step of the way.
Behance
Behance is an online platform where people in the creative industry showcase their work and discover new ideas. The job of a product manager demands that they find new ways to keep whetting the appetite of users. But new ideas are not always easy to come by. Many times, a spark is needed before a new idea can be birthed.
Behance provides the perfect situation and conditions for that spark to occur. Being a platform where many creatives showcase their work and talent, it contains an inexhaustive library of content from which you can get inspiration for your next project. In addition to this, it comes with a filtering feature that allows you to quickly and easily sort through contents that are peculiar to your needs.
For Research
UserBit
UserBit is a real-time collaboration platform that incorporates different tools. These tools allow product teams and designers access to information about consumer and business needs.
UserBit is a research library software where teams can collect, analyze, and share their research. Its features enable teams to manage research participants, user interviews, survey data, notes, and research files.
Some features of UserBit include but are not limited to the provision of tools that support robust text analysis, insights repository, persona maker, and journey mapping.
Otter.AI
This is another great tool that enhances the research activities of product designers. Otter.ai allows users to create and organize notes for interviews, meetings, lectures, and every form of voice conversation. By providing qualitative analysis features like tagging, affinity diagrams, word clouds, to mention a few, Otter.ai is perfect for analyzing, and synthesizing qualitative data.
Powered by Ambient Voice Intelligence, Otter.ai can perfectly meet the requirements of any team irrespective of its size. Collaboration on this service is very easy as it collects and stores recordings from web browsers and user devices. It can also integrate easily with Zoom which further enhances its usefulness.
FlowMapp
FlowMapp is a web development tool that helps with the creation of visual interactive sitemaps and for better UX planning that aims to maximize user experience. It has powerful collaboration features so team members can have real-time updates on current projects.
With this software, product designing teams can flesh out part of the information architecture and increase the development process of products. And this can lead to an increase in sales conversion of a business. Flowmapp will help you to optimize your workflow an improve your productivity as a Product Designer.
Lookback
This is a video-based tool that facilitates synchronous communication between product designers and users. It allows you to carry out video and audio interviews of users irrespective of location.
In addition to this, you can create tasks to be completed by users with Lookback. The major advantage of Lookback is that it allows end-users to actively participate in the process of a product’s creation. This goes a long way in ensuring that the final design will meet the specification of a wide range of customers.
For Design
SIP
SIP is a powerful, compact color sampler that allows you to build palettes using colors you come available anywhere on the digital space. In most design software, users have to key in alphanumeric text values. This experience is different on SIP as users typically choose colors from an interface that you a visual representation of the colors.
The pixel-precise color picker on SIP allows you to select just the right shade and range of color that fits your taste. And, even after doing this, SIP offers a palette manager where you can make careful adjustments before assigning a color to your fill function.
SIP supports multiple palettes of complementing shades, thereby giving you the freedom to build a whole family of colors that work together.
RigthFont
RightFont is a professional font management tool that has many cool features that ease the creative process.
The software, which is only available on Mac OS, is a lightweight, easy-to-use program that is integrated into many popular design software tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Sketch, and many others. Some of its standout features include a font manager, syncing, and auto-activation function that allows you to organize and easily access thousands of your fonts collection.
It also has an automated google fonts collection that prevents you from losing any of your favorite fonts, and an icon fonts manager from where you can use a variety of symbols and icons.
Sketch
Sketch was created for use by graphics designers, but many product designers have found it to be extremely useful. Its recent update which makes has made it easier to use and arguably more intuitive than photoshop is one major reason more and more designers find Sketch to be desirable.
Primarily designed for use on Mac OS, the vector editing program possesses a complete set of toolkits that allow you to create objects that reflect your ideas up to the last pixel. Some of its features include a symbols plug-in for smart objects, smart guides that highlight a selected object’s position relative to the edge of the document page. It also has an easy grid feature that allows you to specify the number of rows and columns where you want to arrange your selected objects.
Figma
Figma is an online design tool that works in web browsers and also on some native apps so that you can work offline. It’s one of the most popular design tools for many reasons, and, because it is web-based, many Product Designer find it to be more preferable.
Figma has so many cool features that make it endearing to the heart of its users. It has a similar interface and drawing tools as in Sketch, and a similar prototyping feature as in Craft and InVision. There’s also a built-in commenting feature that allows anyone to attach comments anywhere on a design, and many other features that make it a top-notch collaborative design tool.
For Productivity
Notion
The notion is an app designed to help you organize and plan your schedule promptly. With Notion, you as a Product Designer can take notes, create tasks and assign deadlines, manage projects, monitor tasks and do a lot more. Additionally, this software, which is available to users on all platforms, gives you complete control over the layout and toolkits to help you get work done.
One of the standout features of Notion is how it allows not only individuals, but also teams to plan, organize and manage their projects, work, and goals.
Conclusion
There are a lot of tools available in the digital space that you can use on your projects as a Product Designer. However, as earlier stated, you’re only as good as the tools in your toolkit. These software applications are some of the best tools that will guarantee efficiency and desirable output.
As technology continues to develop, it has become essential that people acquire one form of tech skill or the other. The next set of world leaders will be determined by the level of digital skills at one’s disposal. Guiding Academy, a tech start-up will teach you how to apply these tools irrespective of your skill level. The ultimate goal of Guiding Academy is to train and develop the next generation of digital experts who will chart new paths in the global landscape.
