8 Best Tools & Resources for UX/UI Designers in 2021.
Tags: UI Design, UX Design, UI, Designer, UX

№1 — Deploy Empathy

The first resource is called Deploy Empathy. It is very hard for new or beginner UX designers or even pro UX designers to properly do user interviews and develop empathy for a product, design, etc. So deploy empathy is a resource that allows you to download an e-book. An exciting set of resources, set of methods, and set of practices will allow you to improve your user research or your UX research scenarios. You can even join their unique newsletter, which contains the rough drafts of the chapters, so you don’t have to get the entire book. Also, they have enlisted all the things that you’ll be learning through the book. So it’s not just a little summary; it also gives you what you can achieve after reading the book. You can launch a product and figure out why people buy a product or get a service. All these things can be seen on their website. Get it!

№2 — Valkyrie

Valkyrie is one of the easiest ways to create AR and 3D content for your websites or designs and even bring it to life with AR capability. In case you have an iPhone or Android phone, you’ll be able to do that with AR as well. You can check their websites to see some of these incredible examples that they’ve posted up, and they also have a lot of cool stuff that you can check out, and I would love to be able to utilize this on Figma, Web flow, and tools like that.

№3 — Frame stack

Frame stack is a tool for designers, product managers, developers, and anybody who wants to create something. Frame Stack allows you to see the tools you can use to create a certain product. So in case, I want to create a mobile app, it has all the possible directions I can go in. So it has Swift, Flutter, Bootstrap, BuildFire, AppsGeyser. It has both no-code tools as well as fully coded tools. So, for example, if you are a UI designer and want to create motion in your designs, you can choose from any of their pop motions like Mo JS, Paper JS; all these are great examples. If you want to build an actual application, you’ll have to use a lot of these frameworks, and this will help you create your next big deal and has libraries, tools, and services for every single need.

№4 — Around

Around is an application available on Windows, Mac, Linux, even on your browser, which allows you to create on Figma, plan on your documents, even play games. At the same time, in these cool circular bubbles where you can show your face and your voice, but you’re creating things. So the focus is on creation and work rather than on the video platform. What really stood out to me is that whenever you move your face from left to right or in any other direction, it follows your face using its AI technology. So next time your mom walks in from behind while you’re in a video conference, you don’t have to worry because it’s only focusing on your face and nothing else.

I’m absolutely in love with the dashboard design. The dashboard is straightforward to understand, unlike other competitors, I’m not going to name any, and they have a one-minute demo that you can interact with and see how Around works. They have quick integration with Slack as well as Google calendar. So you will never have any problem setting up meetings with your teams, and not only that, they have a crazy, good iPhone app and an Android app. I was actually in a meeting with some of my teammates from my business, and they have things like GIF support, emoji support, animated emojis, and icons that add life to your meetings. It’s not only boring old you sitting on the chair, but you can also add reactions and GIFs, and it gets crazy sometimes. So go ahead, check Around out, give it a whirl, Game, Design, Develop whatever you like.

№5 — Sigma OS

Sigma OS sounds like a weird Figma operating system, but it’s not. Sigma OS allows designers and, in general, anybody to power up their day through this creative new browser. It allows you to have these cool tabs where you have personal work, shopping, etc. You can form these tabs on the left, and these tabs seem like what you would have on Notion or Miro, where you can quickly switch between tabs and pages.

Their search seems like the search you have on Mac OS, where you can quickly search for something, and it takes you to that page or that resource. What I really like about it is the multitasking feature. So you can have one normal window and one multitasking window. You can maybe open Unsplash while you’re on Figma and drag images from Unsplash into Figma; that’d be crazy. It also has certain features that allow you to collaborate with other people while you’re in the browser. You can send a certain page or a resource through the mail; you can tweet it out, you can send it through the messaging app that they have built-in, and they also have the Timers. So if you’re a Pomodoro fan or someone who wants to take a break between work, they have these break times where you can not visit a website or a certain place for a certain amount of time. It gives you a break, forces you to take a break. I think that’s interesting, and in the end, they had to have this, I guess, Privacy. Yes! They apparently don’t sell your data and don’t collect additional information. It reminds me of Firefox since they blocked ad trackers.

№6 — Adobe XD Update

Now parallax motion and animation are coming to Adobe XD. Yes, Figma people, you have to wait for this.

Anima app is a popular app that allows you to supercharge your XD or Figma by adding actual capabilities of animation on the Web, etc., and they have made it super simple to now add parallax scroll to any website without any workaround. All you need to do is select the elements you want to come in as parallax or go out as parallax, and there’s a little parallax button in your Anima plugin on XD. Once you set up that, you have your direction, so which direction the image or the element should move, the scale whether you want it to scale up or scale down. If there is any delay, the easing if it does ease-in, ease-out, anything works, and you can even have overflows if something should be overflowing, all the other elements, you can activate that as well, and Voila! you have a beautiful parallax scroll that moves from top to bottom, bottom to top, and adds actual parallax scroll to your Adobe XD prototypes now. I was really jealous because I started to use Figma a lot, and I wish this comes to Figma real quick because we needed it.

№7 — Figma Update

Figma came up with component updates, which kind of moved the design industry a little bit because they’re finally doing components easier and in the right direction. So, first of all, you can now actually move components between project to project or page to page without creating any links or having any links between each other. Now it’s rather seamless, and not many changes when it comes to updating components across projects. You’ll be able to update components as usual, but it just makes it a little more flexible to copy components from one project to another, one page to another.

Finally, you have swap libraries. This was a much-awaited feature where you can swap between different libraries or different elements from one design system to the other. You don’t have to delete anything; you don’t have to cut out anything or create new components. Everything can just quickly get swapped, and as you can see, it’s pretty seamless and, finally, just like a quick search toggle where you press Command P or Control P to bring up a quick search. You finally now have a Shift I, which brings up the component window and an elegant way to display components as a grid; you can drag and drop whenever you like, and you can finally search for components that you want rather than having to go through and browse through components. You can search, grab and drag; that’s as easy as that.

№8 — Gradient art

Now, gradients have become very popular, and they’re the new trend that has come up. I personally use gradient in all my Instagram posts. However, this tool called gra.dient.art allows you actually to create art out of gradients. Yes! You can create background layers to basically pick up an image and create gradients out of that image. You have a CSS editing tool, so basically, after you do this, you can copy this code from here and actually apply it to your coded websites. You also have free cloud storage, so much like Figma, you won’t lose anything once you sign up for this, and they have many examples ready for you. So you don’t have to start from scratch. You can learn from the examples, and it seems like a full-fledged gradient tool. If Figma were a gradient tool, gra.dient.art would be that tool; it’s crazy.