The aim of user interface (UI) design is to achieve beauty, harmony, and usability when laying out a website with elements like typography, color schemes and imagery. In user experience (UX) design, the goal is to anticipate the user’s journey and translate it into an intuitive and welcoming website.
Whether you’re a professional designer or a hands-on entrepreneur, there are many programs available today to help you do this. So in this article, we’ll roundup the best UI and UX design tools for you and your website design that you should keep in your arsenal.
Tip: Wix’s visual editor removes the learning curve from UI and UX design when you create your website. Right from the start, users have a ready-to-go template for everything—whole websites, full pages, sections and individual components.
Below you’ll find information on:
8 Best UI and UX design tools
The following tools include a wide range of solutions that will help you strategize, organize, visualize and implement inclusive designs and interactions for your website. What’s more, you don’t need to be a professional designer or have programming skills to reap the benefits of these solutions.
1. FlowMapp
UX design takes into consideration the entire picture of a product’s creation—from its design to its launch. The process entails five steps: Ideation and definition, research, analysis, design, testing, and then finalization, launch and repeat. To help you with the first three steps of the process, FlowMapp offers a number of UX tools and templates that help create:
User flows
Customer journey maps
Sitemaps
The web-based app also provides clients sharing and collaborative capabilities for teams.
2. Miro
Both UX and UI designers use whiteboard tools throughout their process to brainstorm, plan, iterate and design. Miro is a whiteboard tool that comes with useful pre-built UX and wireframing templates.
You can also use it for UI, as you add images, files, and third-party tools to your whiteboard and have your collaborators give feedback with commenting and voting features. The app is available for browser, desktop (Mac and Windows), as well as mobile and tablet devices (iOs and Android).
3. Balsamiq
Once you hit the design phase, you’ll likely create low-fidelity wireframes to communicate your vision. Balsamiq is a UI design tool that enables users to quickly create these web page sketches. In addition to laying down the structure and main components for each page, users can create wireframes based on specific devices and operating systems, using premade UI components and icons (e.g. Buttons, Forms, Media, etc.) The tool’s drag-and-drop interface can be mastered in minutes, and can be accessed via a browser or desktop app (Mac and Windows).
4. Figma
Figma is a multipurpose web/desktop/and mobile solution that spans the entire UI and UX design process. The first three steps can be completed via its online whiteboard FigJam. From there, you can actually design and test both your lo-fi wireframes and hi-fi prototypes from the main Figma app as well hand off your designs to developers to build.
Plugins created specifically for Figma will make the process of designing a website go more smoothly and quickly, too. For instance, there are plugins for spell check, stock photo integration, and data visualization.
5. Adobe XD
Adobe is a powerhouse in the design field. Of all the apps in the Creative Cloud suite, Adobe XD is your best option for UI and UX design and can be accessed via desktop or mobile. Because it’s part of the larger Adobe family, users also benefit from built-in features they won’t find in other UI design apps. For instance:
Object blur
Vector drawing
Blend mode
Lottie animation
Adobe fonts
Its design editor enables users to design wireframes (see wireframe examples), mockups and prototypes all from the same tool—so there’s no need to switch from tool-to-tool once you get started with Adobe XD. Its collaboration feature enables coediting with in-app comments and mentions.
What’s more, it comes with a built-in design system, so you can save and reuse global settings for components like colors, typography, shapes, imagery and more. This feature is great for design consistency and efficiency.
6. Sketch
Sketch is a great tool for efficient and precise UI design. Its editor is well-organized and includes easy-to-use features like Snapping and Smart Guides that help size, space and align UI elements. When it's time to hand off your designs to a developer, the app’s version control, UI inspection and asset downloads turn this into a seamless process. Sketch is available as a Mac app, plus a web app and Mirror (mobile) apps for previewing designs and testing prototypes.
7. Proto.io
Proto.io’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor gives you the ability to prototype designs created in Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch or to create designs from scratch with the help of Proto.io’s library of UI assets, fonts and more. Create them on the web-based app, then use their iOS and Android mobile apps for previewing and testing.
Because this is first and foremost a prototyping platform, Proto.io has all the tools you need to bring static designs to life: set up triggers and actions for different UI elements, create advanced animations for any page, layer, or component you want, plus add screen transitions, Lotties, GIFs, videos and more.
8. Marvel
Technically, you can do all of your design work with Marvel’s web-based app–wireframe, design UIs, prototype, and test—but you can also sync it with another design platform like Sketch. Validation is an important part of UX design, but it’s a process that designers often have to manage outside of their design tools. With Marvel’s user testing tool, you can run user tests on your prototypes right where they are.
