None of this is sponsored. I just enjoy these tools.
🖤
“What tools do you use to design better and be more productive? We don't have a UX researcher on our team, how do you get to know what your users want? How do you manage brand guidelines for a company as big as Keap?”
Nope, you won’t see Adobe products, Sketch, Invision, or Google Analytics on this list.
While those products are awesome in their own ways, they’re also industry incumbents. There are many tools on the scene that rank higher for the needs my team and I have right now. That’s the key: “right now”. Every 18 months to 2 years it’s worth it to check your creative processes and swap out tools. This was my exact scenario when I switched our team to our first product:
Figma
(and the Figma Mirror app)
Figma is my everyday design tool. It's hands down the fastest, lightest, and easiest way for my brand & marketing team to design:
Web pages, microsites, modals, landing pages, etc.
Mobile, tablet, and desktop wireframes and prototypes
Product UI visuals, dashboards, interactions, and concepts
Advertisements, display banners, and one-off graphics
Templates for blog thumbnails, video production, and social posts
...anything you can think of that's not animated.
Source: Figma.com
These were the biggest reasons we made the switch to Figma from Sketch:
Figma is web-based so there are no crazy versioning or overwriting file issues. We can also save out .fig files for safekeeping if desired.
Live collaboration allows designers to work in the same file at the same time. We get to play—a key design concept lost on many teams because designers tend to work alone.
Permissions for viewing, editing, and commenting can be setup so copywriters can edit and try-out their headlines without all the annoying back-and-forth slacks (ping!).
Stakeholders can get a link to view and leave comments or questions. Gone are the days of syncing Sketch to Invision, sending a link, waiting for comments, then reconciling.
Use the Figma Mirror App to easily view mobile designs on your phone.
By moving to Figma we were able to drop use of Invision and Abstract 💰 so it more than paid for itself.
We also opened up our design processes for more transparent collaboration with stakeholders. This made feedback rounds faster, less cumbersome, and happier all-around 😄 . We’ve even been able to partner with our Social Team, the People Team (Internal Comms), and the Video Production team. We set them up with templates tailored to their skillsets and free accounts.
The Figma team also moves as fast as their users are asking for improvements. In the last year they updated key prototyping features and UI to solve for nagging early adopter complaints. They also hosted Config, their first user conference, which we attended remote via livestream.
As a sidenote: My friend Sean Rice introduced me to Figma. We met as coworkers at an agency, but both ended up at Keap. He's the Design Ops Lead. Sean has come up with some unique ways to use Figma during our Design Happy Hours. The Keap Product team is officially making their own switch from Sketch this year.
Again, I’m not getting paid—I just love this program.
Miro
(and the Miro app)
Miro is where I run my most common creative workshops:
Retrospectives: unpack projects that worked well or went off the rails and uncover next steps
Discovery sessions: define the issues, ideas, and MVP approach we might take to solve user problems
Ideation sessions: create user flows, web pages, nurtures, assessments, and all manner of interactive experiences
Moodboards: visually concept and brainstorm
User testing and design sprints: log observations and insights
UX processes: conduct empathy mapping, journey mapping, and needs prioritization
Miro is like Figma in that it uses web-based, live collaboration methods. But, it's user friendly for non-designers. New users can get a handle on it within 5min and feel comfortable throwing sticky notes up onto the board. We can collaborate while not in the same room, which was necessary to make workshops run well in the past.
Source: Miro.com
The Miro app is great. It allows you to snap a photo of your sketches and drop it onto your board in seconds. Then we use the voting tool to rank needs, features, ideas, etc. and determine next steps based on impact and/or consensus.
As work becomes remote-friendly, Miro makes our workshops simple, fair, and easy to document. At the end of sessions I can export JPGs, PDFs, or Vectors of artboards which we document on GDrive or via email.
Miro's robust template gallery includes UX playbooks from Atlassian and others. There's always something new to learn.
Frontify
Frontify is a brand hub platform. I use it to manage, share, and expand brand guidelines at Keap. For a company of ~400 people it's important brand assets are easy to find and access at the right levels.
I built a few brand guides to meet the needs of employees, partners, and the public in different ways. For example:
Our partner guide has a request access login to confirm their app IDs to access private content
Our employee guide has an in-depth media library for customer imagery, campaigns videos, and ad assets
Our public guide houses the essentials for press, PR, etc.
If we ever wanted to merge guides, we could use 'Targets" to make certain sections inaccessible.
The dashboard is easy to use, but the permissions are more complicated than I'd like. Once I learned how to setup & manage groups it was a gamechanger. When we work with an agency, I can setup a specific group for them and set an end date based on the SOW we have. That means I don't have to 'remember' to remove them—one thing off my plate! 😅
Frontify has some drawbacks to the back-end:
You cannot duplicate pages or sections across separate brands yet
I've experienced annoying bugs when building out pages
The Media Library doesn't provide a ton of customization for layouts or collections
Loom
While I've just started using Loom it's quickly becoming a go-to tool. I think they explain themselves best:
"Sending a Loom is more efficient than typing long emails or spending your day in meetings having conversations that don’t need to happen in real-time. You talk up to 6 times faster than you type. With Loom, you can capture your screen, voice, and face and instantly share your video in less time than it would take to type an email."
I've heard about Loom a couple times, and finally gave it a shot because their free trial is generous. So far I've used it to record a retrospective and a demo of Miro. I'd like to use it to record short demos of our UX workshops next. It exceeded my expectations:
The interface is easy. Simple.
Trimming video within their platform means I don't have to load up video editing software.
Emoji reactions! You can enable them to see how people feel about parts of the recording. This is great for building buzz internally and come on—it's fun!
Me recording a Loom while doing a Miro workshop
FullStory
FullStory is a platform that connects what users do in your app or on your website across a single session or many journeys. The 'analytics engine' (so fancy) logs the connected experiences, and you can segment them in infinite combinations.
If you don’t have experience in analytics dashboards it can be intimidating at first. But, after a few introductory articles it’s easy for a creative (like myself) to get around and create segments 😊.
I use it as a direct connection to our users to see where they're bottlenecked, bouncing, or even getting confused, bored, angry or experiencing a problem (rage clicks and errors!). FullStory includes heatmaps, custom funnel tracking, and so much more. I can see where the smoothest journeys are as well as the problematic ones.
The real magic is in being able to see exactly what your user experienced so your product or marketing team can fix it. It's like Google Analytics meets usability testing.
It's not cheap. FullStory is most cost-effective for teams with comfy research and analytics budgets. You can get a demo or try it for free (but only up to 1000 sessions/month).
There you have it folks! The five design, UX, and research tools I use most. I’ll share more tools that help me gain insights, stay productive, and have fun in future installments. I'm interested in what you use everyday. Reach out and let me know on twitter. 👋
