Powerful tools I use in a design process that will blow designers’ mind
By: Ecky Alimansyah
Tags: Design Process, UX Design, Figma, UI Design, Tools For Design

1. Post-it

Say you are in a meeting, and you need to take notes on the pain points of your team leader or users. You don’t even need to come with a thick note and pen to the meeting. All you need is type what needs to be noted using Post-it.

I have been using it in order to gather data, user’s insights, feedback in or after a meeting. It helps me to map out what could be defined as a feature and as users’ pain points. I can easily make a group of User stories, Real Problems, and Solutions.

And the most powerful feature that Post-it note has is the ability to export it to Trello board. I mean, that’s very mind-blowing. You don’t even need to rewrite all the features to Trello — Scrum masters must really know how painful it is every time they’ve done design sprint meetings and have to export every note manually into Trello board.

Which brings us to the next powerful tool I used to manage our team doing their job.

2. Trello

Trello has been helping me a lot since I was having my first project as a student. I might never use any other project management tools rather than Trello. Its ability to enable teams to see and keep maintain the progress of a project is somehow dazzling.

Every time I am chosen to lead projects, I can easily manage tasks and assign them to our team. It helps the project leaders to keep the timeline on track.

3. UIPRINT

UIPRINT helps you provide printable wireframes, mockups, and sketchpads. It’s a very mindblowing tool that can give designers the ability to quickly draw clean wireframes and to stay better organized on projects.

Before jumping to High fidelity design, I always do a quick draw UI sketches on the paper to place all the UIs I have defined before. It allows teams to bring out ideas on a piece of UIPRINT paper at ease and help define problems faster by sticking it on the board or something so the team can correct, revise and give thoughts about it in crazy eight-phase.

UIPRINT also provides types of wireframe sketch such as mobile as well as desktop.

4. Whimsical

When it comes to mind-mapping, designers have their favorite tools to use such as Miro or whatever they’re using. But if you have a job that requires you to work faster or more agile to collaborate, then this might be the best mind-mapping tool ever existed.

To me, Whimsical has a special place in my heart. The amazing thing about Whimsical is how easy and fast it is in helping me map out flowcharts, making user journey using wireframes, sticky notes and of course, mind maps. Also, I have been doing a lot of presentations lately. Therefore, Whimsical is there to be very friendly for presentations. It provides designers to export their work in high resolution.

Whimsical gives 4 free boards each user. If you’re willing to pay more for this app, I think it’s worth it. But to me, having 4 free boards is enough in doing my daily work.

5. Figma

This might be the best designing apps ever existed. It’s the only reason why I left Sketch for good. There are no designing apps faster than Figma.

I think Figma reinvents a new way of how designers should design. It’s amazing how easy it is to share design across the organization. Breaking barriers that have been bothering designers, clients, project managers, etc. Collaboration among designers is freaking easy. Designers can work at the same time, in the same file, and the same team. Say goodbye to final_design.sketch,and final_final_design.sketch.

Figma also somehow redefines how it should be in gathering reviews and thoughts about the design. Clients can easily put some comments on the exact point of the wireframes in real-time. It indeed saves us a lot of time.

I can’t say enough words on how powerful Figma has been in designers’ eyes. Kudos to Figma teams for making the impossible possible.

6. Maze

The team and I have been using Maze lately due to its capability in conducting any kind of possible testing scenario that no other usability-testing apps have done.

It gives the team summarized insights about how users behave on the design you test during testing-phase. The powerful thing about this is that it’s able to give us the success analysis precisely. As you can see, the numbers are really important to our team to help decide what we should change, and on which screen that the team needs to redesign.

7. Slack

Imagine your discussion that happens at a workspace that can be efficiently managed with Slack. It has been helping our team build a better topic discussion as it allows us to discuss in the desired channel. So we don’t have to create many groups every time we had a team discussion talking about other topics.

The powerful thing I like from Slack is the ability to integrate with many other apps such as Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, and many more. It helps our team to stay in touch with the desired files we’ve been working on.

8. Paper by Dropbox

Last but not least. Paper has been helping our team a lot in gathering all the useful information of users we need during the design process. Whatever comes up in the discussion or brainstorming session, I always write it on Paper. It’s very helpful that Paper allows teams to open discussions on such ideas. Whenever one of our team concludes something related to the research, all I need to do is give feedback easily on the paragraph or sentences that we have been discussing. It helps our team to collect data as documentation to design requirements.

It’s very fun to discuss on one same document. Imagine that you have one big paper and you can pour ideas that your team might see and respond in real-time.