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Yes, tools are important. They make our work more effective. They make our communication with different stakeholders more effective, more fancy sometimes. They could trigger stakeholders paying attention to what we are doing, but they are just the tools. They're here to help us communicate ideas and solve problems. So don't overpay attention to tools. ♪
Hello everyone and welcome on the next episode of Anvisa Yovana's podcast, which is called Honest UX Talks. In this episode, we will try to tackle the topic about UX design tools. Some people were asking us in the DM, what tools do we want to use? And let's say, what do we use right now? What are the hot tools right now in the market and what beginner designers can learn right now so that they don't waste time in the future learning new other tools.
So I think it could be an interesting topic to tackle. And before we dive into that topic, Ioana, how was your week and any updates on your side that you want to share with us? Thanks for asking. And I love a little ritual of discussing what has happened in between our calls.
Right now, the main activity in my life, besides the baby, of course, which is the absolute main activity, but the second main activity is working on the school that I'm about to launch very soon. And I've had intensive meetings with the team of designers I'm working with, and everybody is very hyped, and the energy levels are very high, and we're both...
excited but also stressed out because it's a new experience it's gonna be we're gonna be learning so much along the way of building this product if you want we're treating it like a startup we actually call it our startup so yeah it's we're like teenagers looking
to change the world we're gonna revolutionize the way people learn we're gonna do so much good in the world and probably reality will hit soon and probably it won't be that easy and we're gonna hit all sorts of things but you you've been through that already you probably know better that it's it's gratifying but it's not easy i can assume and we've
We've also been doing a lot of work, putting a lot of work into it since last summer. So yeah, I'm excited to be able to share more with you and with our listeners very soon now. Probably they'll find more information on my Instagram profile. So yay!
Yeah, that's we're probably going to start communicating and teasing in March. April will be a more, let's say, building the cohort, reviewing applications, talking to the interested students and so on. And probably starting May, we're going to have the first cohort up.
and running and probably we're gonna see depending on how much interest there is, if we're gonna do monthly cohorts or every two months, but yeah, April will be the heaviest in terms of communication efforts. So we'll start to see things moving in March, but yeah, probably everybody will know about it, I hope by the end of April.
I'm sure people already start saving the dates for April. Yeah, and a quick update on my side as well. I also started thinking about, so remember I told you about the yearly plan or the yearly goals for this year.
And I finally started working well because the first two months I was really wrapped up in the social media rebranding and system and whatever else. But finally, I guess this week I've started working on the next goal, which is more public talks or more presentations and workshops online. So I'm finally moving towards that goal and yeah.
the I'm planning to have one talk on April. It's going to be for FigmaConf, not for FigmaConf, not the official one, but like a one local meetup in Athens. And the other one would be in May. So it's going to be, I think most of you and for sure you, Ioana, have heard of it. It's front row where there are a lot of great creators online come together and share their experiences. So I started thinking about the topic already and
I'm probably going to share some sort of a practical workshop or a slash presentation on how can I, basically the goal of the talk I'm trying to prepare right now is to make the onboarding journey, the transition to UX design journey much more smooth, more like a smooth sailing into the UX design if we want. And really all the things that you can keep in mind. And actually even something that we were discussing in these episodes in the past
such as um this learning uh learning persona exercise or how do you know where to apply and how do you prepare what's your learning journey should be like and uh what questions you should ask yourself how much time you should allocate and all those things so i try to kind of prepare the agenda um
and help maybe people who are trying to transition to your design and overwhelmed with the amount of resources and things that they could be doing and kind of put it into some structure that people can use and maybe make it a bit more strategic, almost like planning it with some sort of template. So I hope that would be something like that. We'll see how it turns out. I started drafting the talk or a presentation.
And I'm also very, very excited to see how it turns out and if that will be helpful at any scale. I think it totally will because it's a subject that we both know very well that it's on the mind of many, many aspiring designers out there. So it's going to answer a real need out there. And plus, I think that I will be joining you at Front Row Conference. I think I confirmed. I accepted the invitation, but I'm not quite sure. Yeah.
But yeah, maybe this is a good reminder that I should follow up on the conversation with Raya. So yeah, it's a great event. And every year, I love the speakers. I feel like it's a small family. So it's great. And I'm looking forward for your workshop. I'm going to be on a 10th.
Okay, so I guess we can start get started with the topic of today at this point. So as I said, the topic of today's episode is the tools, UX design tools, what do we use, what do we think we should be, you should be using if you're starting out and maybe if there are any market standard tools.
So I'd like to start by asking you, Ioana, what tools do you currently use as of year 2021? I can answer for, let's say, the entirety of 2020. I've been using Stigma in my workplace as the main design tool. And also I've started using it for personal projects, but I'm still using Sketch because
because I have a lot of legacy documents, especially on the social media assets. And so I find it, I think I tried one to transition from Sketch to Figma to move some file, transfer some file, but I couldn't get my head around it easily. And so I gave up immediately and I decided, okay, I'm going to still use Sketch and Figma in parallel. So these are the design tools that I use most frequently.
I have been using Miro for a long time since it was real-time board and it wasn't even called Miro. But last year, I kind of started using it more intensively. So it became, let's say, the go-to place for starting any design project.
which in the past would be somewhere in Sketch, creating a page that's called Discovery or that's called Research or something along these lines. But right now I'm starting a design project and the work I've done in Miro. Other tools that I've been using, of course, Zoom, if you want to consider it a tool, it became mandatory not only for meetings, but also for research purposes.
What else? I have a favorite tool for the research efforts I've been doing. It's called Userbit. It's something that I discovered from a design agency that I was a consultant for. They're from Switzerland. I don't know if this is a Swiss product, but anyhow, they showed me Userbit and I really liked it. And it's a tool in which you can create interview guides and then map out the answers and then
tag the answers, create affinity diagrams. They also have a persona component. So it's really good and it really helped me with as a support for the interviewing efforts, which we all know can get very messy once you start to extract all the findings and the insights and post-its all over. Now all the post-its are digital, of course. And yeah, Userbit helped me. And
Yeah, I think these are top of mind. I've also started to use Notion thanks to you, Anfisa. So thank you for revolutionizing my work. Notion is great indeed for managing my work.
You can do pretty much anything in Notion, actually. So we also talked in a previous episode about creating a portfolio with Notion, which is starting to become a trend. I see more and more people exploring this format for their portfolios. And yeah, I don't want to take more time. I'm curious to hear what tools you're using right now.
Oh, gosh, I think like this topic could be, we could talk about it for ages. Because if I look right now at my table or my phone, or in general, what I've been using in the past, it's like overwhelming how many tools there are. It's one topic about, you know, what tools do we use on a daily basis, I think, and on different stages of the design process.
as well as what are the new hot tools that we need to look out for, because I believe that there are more interesting trends coming up, maybe 2021 or even moving forward. I would probably start from the basic tools I definitely use day to day and that stick with me already in any design process. Mainly when I start the process, it would be Miro. And it was my students who always use Miro, even though Figma right now kind of follows pretty similar tools. They kind of suggest different
similar interaction tools yet we're still using Miro for interaction for collaboration and links and workshops and stuff like that that's usually the main to-go tool but then well actually there is also the project management tool which for my personal projects as you I usually would use Notion in the past I was using Trello but for projects at work of course we use Jira and Confluent and all of that things which is more I guess corporate toolkit
Then when it moves forward with the project development cycle, I would say that it would depend because if I use research, if I need to do the research in my side projects, I would use tools like Google Survey or Typeform. Or sometimes I would use the tool Airtable because they actually recently introduced
the new format which is called forums or surveys where the Airtable is a really great tool very interactive it's kind of dynamic excel sheets if you wish so it's all about databases but you can tweak this databases to use in any format you can use it all in
like cards, like a Kanban, or you can use it as a survey where every answer that you will receive will directly go to your database and you can manage all your research there. So I kind of tweaked it for my needs, for user search needs. I'm going to find it extremely valuable. You can also automate many, many different things there. So I kind of found it super cool.
as the tool for a search, but I've heard about UserBeat as well and I feel like, oh, this is a really, really good tool. I haven't tried it actively, but I saw it and I tried it once and I think I should be kind of trying to use it as well a little bit more. But as we move forward through the project,
There are different tools there that pop up. For example, for design brief or strategy, I would still use Figma or Miro depending on, you know, are you working alone or with people or collaborate with somebody like other stakeholders in the team.
But when it comes to the actual, so let's say you have done your strategy, you have done your research, you know what you're trying to build at the end of this project. So as you start prototyping, of course, it's pen and paper. I still prefer pen and paper. Sometimes I would use the iPod tools like Notability, where you can sketch things around and it's so easy to move things around. It's just like when you do a sketch and you want to copy it, it's so much easier on iPad.
But it's not the same feeling as you would do on the paper, because when you do it with the paper, I think I'm more engaged in the process of visual brainstorming. So pen and paper, sometimes iPad. But as we come to this most, I guess, interesting topic, what design tool do we want to use to prototype our solutions? This is where the whole debate starts.
And in my experience, I've been using probably like Yuya Wano sketch for most of the time from I think 2000, whatever, for 15 or something. Before that, I was using Photoshop and Illustrator, but I preferred Illustrator. Then there was this era of sketch. Everybody was using sketch.
And then in 2019-ish, maybe 18-ish, depends where you work, people started transitioning either to Adobe XD or to Figma. And I particularly felt that Figma is more like my piece of a cake. So I kind of transitioned to Figma more proactively. It was a little bit hard, honestly speaking, after developing such a strong mental patterns of using Sketch and having everything so organized and so underhand organized.
Everything seemed to be so usual to me and I was so, so, so effective with Sketch, but then basically everybody started moving to Figma and you realize this real big need that you need to collaborate, that you need to have those design system in place, which Sketch unfortunately wasn't providing quickly, I guess. So they started to fall apart behind the market needs and here we are mainly
I feel like right now, and correct me if you feel like it's a different story, but I feel like right now the market is moving to adopt Figma as the main market standard. At least this is what I see in, not just in startups, which were the first one who picked up the tool for collaboration and not just for design agencies, but also for big corporations.
And I'm working in one of those corporations and we are transitioning to Figma as well. And the previous company I was working for, which was also a corporation, they transitioned to Figma also in the beginning of 2020. So I do feel like Figma is becoming this one huge tool, which is very hard to beat right now. I know that XD is keeping up. They're trying to suggest new features. They do have some benefits of using the tool.
But I think the main benefit of using Figma and why people are so keen to transition to it right now is the fact that it's free. It offers one-stop shop where you have everything starting from collaboration, sketching, prototyping, handoff.
and stuff like that. So pretty much everything you need, design system and everything else. So everything you need for effective design work, you can find in Figma. Yes, they still have some things to work further, but I feel like it's, again, because it's a one-stop shop, it's very hard to try to use other tools.
it was the same story for my company. I also work in a big company, over 3000 employees all over the world. And Figma, we were all using Sketch.
And we were also complementing Sketch with a bunch of handoff tools. Like we were using some teams were using abstract, other teams were using Zeppelin, other teams were using, I don't know, some people I think were using InVision. So we were all over the place in terms of how the handoff was being done. This was one side of the problem. There were many problems to how the team was organized globally. But yeah,
Figma felt like it has the strongest cooperation capabilities. And so I think that's why it won eventually. And I do think that for companies, there's a paid plan. If I remember correctly, we were paying. So it's free for individual use. But if you want to use it for corporate purposes, then it's not free anymore. But that's normal. And I think that...
Yeah, I think that why Figma won 2020 and will continue to win is that it's really easy to share the design, to create prototypes that are easy to share. You don't have all the hassle of opening Sketch Cloud and then, I don't know, all the workarounds. I was using Sketch with InVision for a long time. Before that, I was using Sketch with Marvel to prototype because I felt that Marvel was doing a...
better job at prototyping. So it was all I felt like I was in all these tools simultaneously and it was hard to manage. And I think that Figma does a great job, just like you said, at giving everything in one place. It's centralized. It has most of the capabilities that a designer might normally need. Plus, it's great for collaboration. And indeed, just like you said, you mentioned Figma and design systems. We did build our design system in Figma.
So it worked and it works quite well.
Well, and yeah, that's why I interrupted you. Sorry. No, no, no. I feel like it's perfect. What you just said is perfectly complementing what I was, my thread of thoughts, I guess. And I also had like all those notebooks with different login passwords or two different accounts. And oh my God. And also like at work, we were still using abstract. And I figured like before I wasn't using abstract and only like for this half a year, I was trying to get into abstract and it's just so complicated. It's so hard to manage those version. And the thing is just not...
it's too easy to turn into mess which is turning into mess if you don't spend enough time kind of pre-arranging things and building some solid structure around your collaboration i think that abstract taps on the mental models that developers have because you have to commit the changes and so it's it's a different mental model with building branches and i wasn't able just like you said i wasn't able to adapt to this uh mental model and uh
for me abstract I had I had people on the team that loved using abstract but for other people it was very stressful yes it's stressful and it's also hard to find things there and it's just like you're not you're not even sure where is this project where is this thing what the what's the source of truth right now and
There are just too many explorations that people keep committing because they still need to collaborate, but it's not the most effective one because, well, design is messy. And as much as I wish we could build one great design and commit it, well, it's not possible.
And we are working in this very dynamic, iterative processes. So it's not easy to commit and make sure that it's done forever. It's not done. It's always developing. And also to the point, when I said that Figma is free, I did meant that it's free for individuals. And that's why it becomes so easy for individuals who maybe, let's say, trying to transition to Figma
Try it out before your company makes a big move, right? Because, you know, if you have all your files, all your legacy in Sketch, it could be stressful to move. So people, because it's free, you can actually just start today and play around, make some side projects, even posts for Instagram if you prefer. And actually it's getting, well, it will take you some time,
Maybe for me, it took maybe a few months to fully understand how things work and how things are different from Sketch. But it was very easy because, again, you could do your side projects there and it's free and it's not that you have to commit to the tool, right? You just give it a try. But then you start filling it and it's very easy to transition to it once your company is also transitioning to Figma, if, of course, they plan to do that.
And so I felt like it's natural transition for many people. Most of the people in my company were testing Figma already for years, not years maybe, but at least a year.
So we felt really prepared to get into this part. But also Figma has this design system analytics, which I felt like super powerful. You can see what components are being used and who contributes more here and there. And it's just like, it's all transparent. And I really love analytics and data. So it makes you really empowered when it comes to your work. So we talk about the topic design tools, right? There are a bunch of tools. We feel like Figma is the most
strong one at this point right now in the beginning of 2021 and we will see how it turns out maybe xd will you know catch up and actually make a big bold change and everybody will start turning to it we will see um
But, but as of right now, Figma is the market leader on our opinion. And there are great tools out there that we use such as Notion, Airtable, research tools, maybe like UserBeat, Miro, of course, and a few other tools, which I guess are here and there. For example, I personally feel like the no-code tools are starting to jump into this market and kind of,
occupy a market a little bit. For example, Webflow, we all know many people, many designers started using it and a few more tools we can talk about in the future. But I thought about, you know, we're talking about the tools here a lot.
So I wanted to maybe also make a step back and also discuss the question, how important are the tools for our processes? So can you imagine being a designer without design tools? Do you really need to have a tool to be a designer? What's your intake on this, Ioana?
I think this is the most important question that we'll ask today actually. So the question, the questions what tools are the market standard, what are the tools we are using and so on, they're fun to discuss but essentially what it all comes down to is that the design craft is not about knowing how to use one tool or another, it's about knowing how to solve problems. So tools are just
enabling you to go through your thought process. They support you along this journey of the UX process. So I think that at some point you mentioned pen and paper. And I think that if you are to look at the design job,
In its essence, you can do it with pen and paper. You can then go to a developer and simply explain, this is the solution that I want to see implemented. So it's all these other tools. Of course, they make our practice more, maybe easier, maybe more visual. Maybe they make it more tangible if you want. But in essence, I think that designers can be designers even with just some paper and a pen. These are my two cents.
Totally agree with you. And I'm agreeing with you because I have seen the opposite story when, you know, people just learn the tool and feel like they are designers, which when you see this in practice does not really make sense because you can see a lot of designers thinking that the design is all about making pixels look
beautiful, I guess, or pushing pixels left and right. It's not necessarily, yes, on the paper, it might look like that, but it's not really the truth. And we see a lot of newbie designers that just directly go to Dribbble and copy, basically learn quickly how to use Figma or Sketch or whatever else.
And then try to copy some dribble shot. And those are the designs in the vacuum. They don't necessarily understand what they are solving with the shot, how this particular screen they have designed supports the goal of the user's tasks and how this particular shot actually, you know, works in the whole ecosystem of the product. So it's very, it's definitely not enough to just learn one tool and think you're a designer. It's much more holistic approach.
approach to solving problems. You might be even much better designer if you don't know any tools, but you have the thinking, you know how to solve problems, you know how to approach solving problems. You can make complex things seem easy, you know how to do the research and to understand users' needs. And then tackling those users' needs, you really can use a napkin in the bar, prototype a quick flow to solve that problem.
So I don't think the design tool defines you as a good designer. And I don't think that we need to pay too much attention to the tools. Yes, tools are important. They make our work more effective. They make our communication with different stakeholders more effective, more fancy sometimes. They could trigger stakeholders paying attention to what we are doing, but they are just the tools. They're here to help us communicate ideas and solve problems. So don't overpay attention to tools.
It's fun to play around. It's definitely a part of our process. But I still want to emphasize the fact that without a tool, you can be a great designer. But with a tool, without the process, you cannot be a great designer. Without the critical thinking and the design thinking process, you cannot be a great designer. So that's just my bottom line, I guess, point for this episode. But I just wanted to make it super clear for everybody who's just starting out and thinking that, yeah,
you know, just learning one tool and copying dribble shots would make you a designer. Unfortunately, it's not the case. So tell me a little bit more about your journey of your transition from Sketch to Figma. How did it felt? How was your journey? And if somebody is trying to transition to new tools or learning new tools right now, what would you suggest to the people? I'm going to share my own transition story. And then if I had any takeaways around it, I think that my first transition, and I think the biggest,
transition yet was switching from Photoshop to Sketch. So that was massive because the, I mean, now switching between Adobe Xd, Sketch or Figma or anything of this kind will not feel as alien as it felt going from Photoshop, which is a completely, well, it's not a UX design tool. It was a workaround that UX designers were using in order to be able to generate the visual solutions.
So when I switched, I was kind of just like it happens with any tool that you use for a long time. You get quite accustomed to it. You get very... Your mental models start to shape around it. You have muscle memory and everything is automated. And so when I moved away from Photoshop, it was really difficult because I know that Photoshop was annoying to use as a UX designer and it was...
a lot of unnecessary complexity to the product that you didn't need
for your UX design tasks. But at the same time, I was used to it. And so even if I was using this newer, very clean, simpler and more to the point interface, it took a while for me to get accustomed to it. Now, the next switch I had to do was from Sketch to Figma and it felt much easier because, yeah, they're quite similar in a way. So there are some differences. Maybe shortcuts are different. Maybe, I don't know.
You have some features that are missing in one part or the other, some differences, but pretty much overall, they're kind of tapping into the same mental models. They kind of have the same behavior and functionalities. So the basic idea is that you give yourself some time and you try maybe to use them in
parallel for a while so don't go too hard and okay to starting today i'm going to start a completely different tool and maybe that will slow you down or make you feel frustrated so just it's like i know when we're launching big changes in our products that we tend to leave the old interface when we're redesigning i've been through uh involved in two major redesigns at two big companies so one for an internet banking platform and another for the product i'm working uh now and uh
um yeah the lesson we've learned is that you need to give people the option to still use the old interface at least for a while so i think that this is the advice that i want to give designers if you want to transition make it smoothly don't put pressure uh in the case that the pressure is not being put by the employer because you simply need to use another tool but um
yeah, I don't know if this is good advice or not, but it's what I would do for myself. Curious to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way. Honestly speaking, I don't know why, but I hated Photoshop from the beginning so much. I hated it from the bottom of my heart. And I, every day, even though I get used to it, I hated it. And so when I,
sketch came in I think it was 2014 or 15 something there um I just felt relieved so I jumped into it without even ever looking back so for me it was yes it was definitely a big transition it was definitely a lot of new mental models like you said but I just felt or I was expecting it so so long that it felt like a heaven to me so I kind of I was I was really excited to do this whereas um
the second transition from Sketch to Figma was much more painful to me for some reason. And that's because, yeah, yeah, I know, like, it's interesting because
Many people say, oh, it's so easy. You just, you know, drop your file and it's there. But I felt so attached to Sketch and I almost, it's like, it was like a breakup, hard breakup for me because I get used to Sketch for so long and most of my career was using Sketch and that's why it became so usual and so quick and I've built everything. I was using Sketch for presentations and
for uh for all the complex things and then communications and and research and everything and it just became like my main to-go tool and suddenly I kind of had to switch to a new tool um for different reasons and I guess the main reason why I had to switch was because sketch became so so heavy like it just the performance dropped incredibly because when we moved from photoshop
we felt like we are moving away from the tool that works like a snail. It was so, so slow. It was impossible to do anything in Photoshop. But with some time, Sketch became the same. I'm personal right now. When I open complex files with some library, it's just impossible to move things around. And it just feels so, so frustrating to me. So there was no other option. And I felt like Sketch...
gave up on us that we couldn't use it so effectively anymore and that's why it was just like almost like a for enforcement to move to a Figma where things are so smooth and so easy and you can shuffle around things and move around and many people could use it and it still will work smoothly um so for some reason yes I felt that it was a hard transition um
Like from one relationship to another. But again, after two, three months, I did felt like it's okay. There are things that you get used to. There are small annoying things. There are some differences in how responsive your mock-up works. There's some differences in logics. For example, in Sketch, you would pin things to the side and they would be responsive. But in Figma, you need to have a little bit of a front-end developer mindset with...
with auto layout. And there are small things which you really just need to get accustomed to. So for me, there was some learning curve, but I do agree with you that if you are transitioning from one to another, you do need to give your team or yourself, if you're a solo entrepreneur, some time to get used to it. So don't just
switch to the tool just like that one morning you wake up and you move all your projects there you need to give it a time you need to play around give yourself some side projects pet projects that you want to build in figma and figure things right on the go don't definitely don't jump in the client project um
right away if you have never used Figma because you will ask a lot of questions. How things are organized here? How do you manage this? How do I achieve this? And what helped me a lot was to reach out to people that adopted Figma earlier. So some community ambassadors or advocates for Figma who were using it from 2018 and just knew everything, figured everything out already.
So I just wanted to say thank you, Rusmir, who helped me a lot. He's the community ambassador, I believe, in Sarajevo. If I'm not mistaken, I'm hoping I'm not. But he helped me just a lot. I was basically bugging him for every question I had. And then there is this Figma Slack channel where people share questions and what they have learned today. And it's just so useful when the community helps you out too.
support you to solve, to find a workaround for your need. And it's just super cool that community is already there. So if you have any questions, there are much more people you can reach out to to gain the answers, especially in again, 2021. When we were moving from Photoshop to Sketch, the community was not exactly there. There were things here and there, but it was not like a massive community that would support you in anything you need. But right now, it just feels so much more welcoming in general.
So, yeah, I think like transition today should be feeling much more smooth unless you have a breakup journey like I did have. Another question I wanted to quickly tackle here with you on this episode would be,
For maybe interesting new tools that you're seeing emerging right now in the market, something that maybe early adopters, if early adopters are listening to us, want to look out for. If you're a designer who want to try out different things,
and find the best tool set for themselves right now at this stage of their career. So is there any tools, discoveries that you have done recently that you want to share with the community? Okay, so yeah, I'm hoping that I can share a couple of tools that might prove valuable for the people that are listening to this episode. Before I move on into sharing this tool, I was reflecting on everything we said so far and I just want to add that this
disclaimer that we are not paid by Figma no we're not we're not paid by anything just yet if you have an interest leave a shout out yeah because I know that we talked Figma so much and we praised it and it was like top of mind all the time throughout this conversation and I don't want to I don't want that people get the feeling that this is a sponsored episode it's not
Okay, so getting back to the tools that people can use. I also had a Clubhouse room a couple of weeks ago where I invited people to share resources. So I got a lot of interesting resources from the community. But some tools that I think I want to start with mentioning are the following. So one of them is one that I know that you had some posts recently on.
about a hot chart is something that we didn't mention so far in the conversation and that is a very valuable tool in the design process especially in the discovery phase it helps you get a lot of insights on how people are using um
your website or a webpage. So it's, uh, it's extremely valuable. It shows you heat maps. It shows you click, click maps. So you can see what people are doing even has recordings of the visits. And so this is something that I would recommend anybody to explore, but it's pretty much well known. So I, I don't think this is a, I'm revolutionizing, uh, uh, my listeners right now. Another tool that I feel I should mention, uh, probably is lesser known, uh,
They invited me to be an advisor on their board. So that's how I discovered them. So they're in the early days. It's a tool called Creative Critique. And I think that this space for delivering proper critique in a good setup with the right mindset, with the right goals, with the right frame, if you want, was something that was kind of missing from the design industry. And so I think that it's extremely valuable. It's an extremely valuable tool for teams,
for schools, for people who have courses, for anything of us, even for small teams and individual use could be. But I think that especially for
bigger teams or classrooms or stuff like that. So creative critique is something that will enable you to discuss design better if you want. Then from the community in the Clubhouse room that I organized, there were a bunch of tools around research.
I'm just going to quickly, quickly go through them. Lookback.io is something that I've known for years. I think I was the one that actually mentioned it. It's a tool that has eye tracking capabilities and you will get to perform usability testing with your users and see what they're doing and where they're looking at. Optimal Workshop is a great tool for card sorting. Maze, it's another usability tool
platform that connects the Figma quite well, if I understood correctly from users. I just explored it superficially so far. Optimizely is a great tool for A/B testing.
Yeah, TeamViewer, I understand it's an app where users can get access, can give you access to their screen, which was super valuable, I think. So people will very much enjoy this one, TeamViewer. Hawkeye is another tool that I recently discovered. It's on eye tracking, strong on eye tracking if you want.
Okay, and yeah, I don't wanna, we could continue forever and forever and I could just list a lot of other design tools.
But I'm going to stop here if there's anything that you would like to add. And then maybe we share our final valuable points. Sure. I was even making notes while you were speaking. And actually, I tried to find this one creative critique and I couldn't. So maybe you can share with us the link later and we will add it to the show notes. Because yeah, for some reason, I couldn't find it. But it sounds interesting. Yeah.
So there are three tools that I would like to mention in this episode. There are a few more resources which I will plug later because they have like a sort of comparison, a list of different tools for different stages, but three tools that I personally, actually four tools right now as I'm thinking about it, four tools that I also look for or try to use and I really love them. One tool is called,
flow map and it's basically for you to put together personas, customer journeys, flow charts and stuff like this. So I did really, really love this tool for kind of converge stage of my research.
I also love the tool Uxpressia, which does pretty similar things. They also provide you pretty dynamic tools for creating personas and customer journeys. And they also even have Uxpressia Academy for learning how to build personas and customer journeys in an effective way so that they could communicate with your stakeholders. So those tools are
pretty good for, again, the first diamond or the first stage of your design project. Another tool which I usually would use at the end of my design double diamond, I guess, in the very end, would be called useberry.com, which is the tool, it's similar to maze.com, but it's
I find it a little bit less, I guess, overwhelming in terms of amount of features. So I really love to use it. It could be like a great competitor to maze.com. It's basically Hotjar, but for prototypes, which allows you to set up the tests together for your prototypes, not necessarily like a real products, already implemented products.
But really for, again, you can plug there your link, your Figma link or Sketch, Envision link, and put together a quick test. It could be a five-second test. It could be testing the flow. It could be...
single road flow or could be multiple roads flow so you can really just generate a heat maps to see where people click how they go through the flow what flows they prefer for particular tasks you can also see how much time per task people spend there is pretty good analytics there and
And yeah, I just found this tool really, really useful and helpful for me to spot all the usability issues early on before moving forward for development. And the other tool that I wanted to plug here, which I find really exciting right now, and this is a tool, the new category for me is the no-code movement, where there are a lot of interesting tools coming up together that allows you to basically...
almost like publish real project without coding it i know it sounds crazy many developers would probably listen to this and say like oh my god again those designers just want to avoid code it's not effective it's bad blah blah i do understand this i know that there is nothing beats a good code but um again for quick ideas testing for a quick mpp project um product market fit testing i
I think those tools could be really, really valuable. And with some time, I'm sure they will develop extra features that will allow to build a more clean code. So one of the tools that we all know and pretty much, I guess many people tried it already is called Webflow where you can build visually your website. You still need to have the front end developer logic in mind because you built literally code but visually.
So it's not that you jump on it and you can, you know, move squares around and they will be done, but it's much more easier and it's definitely helping you also to develop some sort of thinking of a developer so you can be a better designer at the end.
And also another tool that I really love or try out sometimes, and right now I'm kind of, you know, wrapping my head around it, is called Bravo Studio. It's like a tool that allows you to build mobile apps, literally skipping development.
And the point of this tool is basically to, okay, you design something in Figma, there are flows, you connect screens to each other. But the issue is that this is a static mockup, right? So you cannot really interact with this. You cannot connect it to some database with some real users data, with some content in there. And that's where you stop. You cannot really populate their real content. So this tool, Bravo Studio, allows you to populate a real content and
basically play, make your prototype almost real, feel real. And the point is that you can actually publish this. It could be an actual product. Yes, right now they have some limited capacity, so you cannot build really interactive databases with relations between data tables, but it's getting there. And I feel like it's already pretty empowering for us designers. It's pretty simple to use it. You just build your prototype and connect it to some database and say, here we show content, here we show users and whatever.
So I think that there was those great tools coming up on the market right now that allows you to build projects, build products without actually coding it and hiring expensive developers for small things that don't necessarily need to be so complicated. And you can actually do them. Just go to one hackathon and build a product literally from Figma. Um,
So this is exciting. I do look out for more tools like this in the market and cannot wait to see us designers being more empowered moving forward for our testing purposes. Especially on the low-code category, I wanted to recommend a tool myself. It's called Editor X. It's launched by Wix. I did have a paid sponsorship with them and that's how I got
discovered them very early on. So when they were in their beta version, I built my website with them and it was, yeah, interesting experience for me because I haven't actually built a website before. I've worked with developers all my life. But it was...
It was a great experience and I love the, I think it's a great tool for designers because it mimics the mental models that designers have. And so this is something that's important for us. Some of the, that no code tools or low code tools are
more aligned to the designer mindset than to the developer mindset, if you want. This was one thing. And I think that their key strength is that they give great control on the design output. So you have the capacity of controlling every breakpoint, every customized breakpoint, make sure it behaves well on every device out there. So it's quite sophisticated, if you want, in a sense. And yeah, I think
people should also try it out. It's called Editor X. And another tool that just crossed my mind completely random is called Mixpanel. And it's a tool for product analytics. And I think that there's some engineering effort involved in order to link the events on your product. But I think it's well worth it. It's actually essential that you track your product's usage. And so Mixpanel proved to be a great solution at
at my current employer so yeah that's that i think we could go on forever and ever and just using awesome tools and this actually leads us to our final point of sharing our top uh top ideas top findings from this conversation and i'm gonna continue my train of thought by saying that i think that as designers we should be empowered and we should empower ourselves to constantly
explore new tools and try out even all the rage, sexy, juicy new tools out there. I think we should try them out because we never know how
you never know how one of these tools might enhance your design process, might help you get more out of the efforts that you're putting into solving problems. And so I think that we should always keep a very open mindset. I know that it's easy to get used to a particular tool. Like I, okay, I'm using Sketch and Sketch is everything I need. I will do everything in Sketch and that's that. But I think that we should focus
force ourselves to explore to get our hands dirty with every new tool that's out there because many times they bring even a marginally value can be super valuable for the final outcome of your design process. This is my first takeaway. My second takeaway would be
one that you mentioned briefly, I touched upon then and I'm touching upon again, pen and paper are actually the fundamental design tools. And
That's all I have to say about it. And my last point is that tools should be regarded as simply a means to an end. So basically, we use tools to enable our thinking process. It's the thinking process that makes us a designer. And just like you said, knowing a tool, learning a particular tool will not make you a designer. It is your thought process and the way you approach your
So you approach solving problems that actually make you a designer. So these are my top three takeaways and I'm really excited to hear yours. I have nothing else to add, but just to amplify what you have just said.
Because I do agree that it's those three main takeaways you need to take from this episode, if you wish. It's important to keep in mind that to be open-minded, to try out new tools, to keep it playful, to don't think about them like a hard commitment that you start and use forever because dynamic market is very dynamic. Things change, new trends are popping up and there are new projects that you never know where it will
bring you, you know, like for example, if tomorrow there is a new client that asks you to prototype something in AR and yeah, you need to explore a new tool for that. By the way, I know that XD does that. So just for a note, but you never know. There are new tools popping up on the market and you need to keep yourself open-minded to try out new things, to avoid mistakes like I did with the breakup with Sketch, which was pretty hard for me. You don't want to be in the same position.
That's my bottom line. And I do agree with you that, yes, we need to focus more on problem solving rather than tools. Tools will not make you a great designer. As much as we play around, as much as we try to make it more effective and save time and communicate better, those are great tools.
Nice things to have, but not essential to you as a professional. For a professional to be a great designer, you need to solve problems. You need to think creatively. You need to empathize with the users, with the business stakeholders. You need to think about
you need to think design thinking, I guess you need to solve problems. That's my bottom line. And tools are just here to make our processes a little bit more sweet and nice and more playful. So don't get attached to them. And, um, maybe I would encourage as my new point to add here, I would encourage everybody to spend their free time playing out with the new tools because they could actually make a difference in your next project. And it could be really handy, um,
for new opportunities. So being open-minded and spending your free time on exploring those new gems could be really useful for you in the future.
That's it, I think, from our side for today. Thank you so much for contributing and asking us this question. If you have any more specific questions on any other topic UX related, just let us know in the DM in our Instagram. And you can always find us as Honest UX Talks on Instagram. We will really like to cover your topic or your question on the next episodes.
Yeah, that is it from our side. Anything else you want to add? You want to say goodbyes? I just want to thank you and our listeners for listening to this episode and this awesome conversation. And yeah, see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Have a great day, everyone. Bye-bye.