Instead of walking through a Sketch file with a dozen artboards or a.pdf, you can present an interactive prototype or share your hosted Framer project URL. Depending on what I’m trying to accomplish I may end up writing some code for things like hover effects, animations and text inputs for an added touch of realism and interactivity. Framer is a design tool that lets you build interactive prototypes extremely fast. With Framer, you can create completely functional prototypes — everything from linking pages together to creating 3D effects. Framer also has thousands of resources in the Framer X Store.
Prototyping tools enable designers to weave visuals, navigational elements, and interactions together to give a solid representation of how a design will behave and feel.
Prototypes are an opportunity to try things out and fine-tune the details, and they’re an essential tool in communicating to decision makers how all of the elements will function together.
Here are 13 prototyping tools to help you with your own design process:
Figma is an all-in-one tool that makes collaboration and accessibility easy for UX designers, developers, and anyone else on a team with a browser-based, cloud-hosted platform. If you’ve worked with Sketch before, you’ll find that Figma has a similar feel that makes it easy to get started with.
Consistency is a priority in web design, and you can use Figma’s flexible styles to control the appearance of text, grids, and other elements across a project. And a variety of useful plugins, like Autoflow for illustrating flows, Figmotion for creating animations, and many others, enhance Figma’s functionality.
Released in 2011, InVision has a well-established reputation, and their dedication to rolling out new functionality and adding to their design platform makes them a favorite among many designers.
With a host of well-designed tools, InVision gives designers the power to put together functional prototypes quickly and to share them with others. It offers so many nice features, including a handy vector drawing tool, repeatable components that can be changed sitewide, and tools for creating animations and other dynamic visual effects.
Collaboration and communication are also strengths of InVision. Freehand lets team members draw, add notes, and offer feedback. And through LiveShare, a prototype can be demonstrated with full interactivity. InVision makes it easy for team members to stay connected and work together throughout the course of a project.
Adobe XD offers a vector-based system for putting together prototypes, including tools for creating interactions, transitions, and other types of dynamic functionality. Because it’s vector based, scaling and resizing elements is no problem.
Adobe XD work well alongside other Adobe family apps like Illustrator and Photoshop. It’s nice to be able to edit Adobe images, like a .psd, right in the application.
Adobe XD covers all the tools a designer needs from conceptualization through high-resolution prototypes. And they’re continually adding to this product with monthly updates that expand its functionality.
As you may have noticed, we are Webflow. We know that you want a smoother and faster design process, and we're here to help you out.
Webflow takes care of two jobs at once. While you’re designing and building a high-fidelity prototype, you’re creating a live website that’s complete with all of the HTML, CSS, and associated JavaScript. Total video converter pro 4 5 0. You don’t end up with just a mockup — you’ll have the real deal.
With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, a powerful CMS, and the capability to create advanced animations, transitions, and microinteractions, Webflow makes it possible to create any type of professional-level website.
If you want a speedy way to design and prototype, Webflow gives you what you need, all without knowing how to code, making it one of the best prototyping tools whatever your skill level.
Axure RP 9 puts the power of wireframing and prototyping all in one package. It allows designers to create low to high resolution interactive prototypes of websites and apps, all without having to code.
Along with what you need to build the visuals, interactivity, and organization, Axure RP 9 also offers a comprehensive documentation tool, which makes keeping track of notes, tasks, and other important assets organized and accessible to those who need to see it.
Axure RP 9 also facilitates a better handoff to developers by letting a prototype be published on their cloud, with all of the code, specifications, and other assets they would need to build it.
Built for professionals, with attention to all of the intricacies of building functional prototypes, Axure RP 9 is for those designers who demand more from their prototyping tools.
If you’re Facebook and your designers don’t have an app that they need, you build it for them. Origami Studio was created for Facebook designers out of necessity, and Facebook so graciously shared it with the rest of the design world.
For designers who need a more advanced system, Origami Studio offers powerful prototyping tools for websites and mobile apps. Central to Origami Studio is a patch editor that lets you build logic, behaviors, animations, and interactions. It comes with many prebuilt patches, and the site says you’ll most likely use just 15–20 of these for most of your prototyping work.
Origami Studio does have a bit of a learning curve that can be daunting at first. But the payoff of knowing how to use their prototyping tools and pulling off sophisticated prototypes makes it well worth learning. This power, along with its compatibility in working with Sketch, makes Origami Studio an important tool for designers who want to go above and beyond standard prototyping.
Justinmind has been gathering momentum as a popular prototyping tool. There are quite a few reasons why, from drag-and-drop functionality, the capabilities to create the simplest to most sophisticated of apps and web prototypes, and plenty of support, like videos and blogs to help you learn how to use it. Justinmind isn’t as huge as some of the other prototyping tools out there, but they’re certainly an up-and-comer.
Justinmind comes with UI libraries and templates, as well as many other practical features. It lets you create the logic for conditional navigation, allows for user testing, facilitates design team management, and more. There’s also a number of integrations that let you use Justinmind with Sketch, Adobe Suite, Azure DevOps Server, and Jira in your workflow.
Its simple interface makes it a great starting point for a beginner UX designer but also offers enough for more advanced designers.
Build complex interactions and animations without even looking at code.
So many UX designers use Sketch as a part of their workflow — and for good reason.
Macgo blu ray player pro 3 1 download free. Uniformity and consistency drive much of Sketch’s functionality. Reusable elements can be used sitewide with a smart layout feature that changes their dimensions depending on what content is inside of them. Then there’s the ease of use. Along with a well-designed user interface, Sketch offers a host of shortcuts at your fingertips to speed up the design process.
Many consider Sketch an industry standard when it comes to prototyping, and its feature-packed and user-friendly interface are just a few reasons why so many designers choose it.
Fluid UI’s software makes for lightning-fast prototyping. With ready-made libraries for material design, iOs, and Windows, as well as gestures, Fluid UI gives you so much to get started with. Movist pro media player for macos 2 2 11. And their simple user interface makes it super easy to put these components together.
Framer is a design tool that lets you build interactive prototypes extremely fast. With Framer, you can create completely functional prototypes — everything from linking pages together to creating 3D effects.
Framer also has thousands of resources in the Framer X Store. You have access to everything from live maps, UI kits, and media players all at your fingertips.
Do you need a prototyping tool that will let you whip up apps and websites quickly? And do it for free? Marvel gives you a complete suite of prototyping tools, without skimping on functionality.
Marvel lets you go beyond static mockups and offers interactivity, dynamic transitions, and gestures to bring prototypes to life and give a real user experience to anyone testing them out. Another nice addition is the handoff tool that gives developers all of the code and assets in their most current iteration to dive in and create a live website, automatically.
Marvel’s collaborative features let anyone on a design team — no matter how spread out, or whatever the stage of production — add notes, make changes, and share ideas in real time.
ESPN, Amazon, and PayPal are just a few of the big names that have used Proto.io. With a comprehensive selection of components and tools, interactive prototypes are made possible without having to type in a single line of code.
Within its web-based editor, Proto.io gives you a variety of drag-and-drop UI web components, templates, icon libraries, and audio and video integrations. You can also bring in anything you have created on your own in Photoshop or Sketch.
With an array of templates, tools, and other components to build prototypes, Proto.io has so much to offer.
Principle lets you create dazzling interactions and eye-catching animations, giving you prototypes that go beyond dull static representations.
With multiple artboards, a timeline-based animation builder, and the ability to import Figma frames, Principle allows you to design an impressive app or web design in a short amount of time.
With an attention to motion and interactivity, Principle stands out among the other prototyping apps out there.
For large-scale projects with many moving parts, prototyping is indispensable. Prototypes let you gather feedback, test usability, and tweak a design along the way.
There are many tools out there to help you, starting with these 13 more widely adopted apps. What’s your favorite prototyping tool? Just let us know in the comments below!
Related reads:7 simple steps to the web design process
As a new or experienced UX designer, you know that creating a quality prototype is an important part of the UX design process. That said, if you don’t have the right tool, it can be a time consuming and costly endeavor. Having the right prototyping tool is key—but how do you find the one that’s right for the way you work or the demands of a particular project?
Some prototyping tools are designed to support early user testing and a basic demonstration of user flows. Others are full-stack which allow you to design your prototypes or wireframes, simulate realistic and rich user interactions, collaborate with your team, and generate code that is ready to handoff to developers. Which tool you’ll select will depend on the goals of your prototype, how quickly you need it available for user testing, who will be working on it, and how it needs to integrate into your workflow.
So many things to consider! That’s why we’ve created this list of our top 11 prototyping tools for UX designers—to help you decide which one is best for you, your team, or your next project. For each tool we’ll cover the cost (USD), system requirements, how easy it is to get up and running, what it’s like to actually use the tool (it’s UX), and the fidelity of the final product. Let’s get into it!
The 11 prototyping tools we’re going to guide you through are:
Adobe XD would be considered a full-stack prototyping tool, meaning you can create designs from scratch, link pages together in a clickable prototype, and share your work easily—all in one tool.
XD is laid out similar to other design editors (e.g. Sketch and Framer) and if you’ve used an Adobe product before it should be familiar to you. XD has built-in tutorials with downloadable resource files which are really great to get you up and running.
Prototypes created with XD can be built for mobile, tablet, or desktop, and I would classify them as mid-fidelity. You can create some advanced experiences with their new voice prototyping commands and audio playback features—but the finished interactions will be visually basic.
If you’re familiar with other Adobe products, this might be a no brainer for you. You can easily create your wireframes in the design tab, then easily switch to prototype and add start linking your components together.
You’ll be able to specify triggers as either tap, drag, key click, or voice command—simply hold down your space bar to activate your microphone, speak the command word you specified and watch your prototype respond! There’s even a built-in preview that allows you to record your prototype in action.
XD seamlessly works with other Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and supports importing from Sketch. All Adobe products work in the Creative Cloud which saves all of your files in one place where you can grant access to your entire team. Further, XD is beta-testing a coediting feature where multiple people can work on the same document live!
InVision is a tool that takes your pre-existing designs and quickly transforms them into a clickable prototype by applying hotspots to your wireframes.
Since you aren’t designing any wireframes in InVision, the platform is simple to navigate. This was the first prototyping tool I’d ever used, and I was up and running very quickly. If you’re already a Sketch user, the Craft plugin makes things even easier as you import your artboards seamlessly into the project area.
InVision is really great for soliciting early feedback on your user flows. It’s simple and quick for others to follow a link to your prototype, create an Invision account, and insert their comments as they click through your prototype on their own devices.
InVision’s layout makes it easy to import wireframes and organize them in your respective user flows. Once you import your screens it won’t take long to understand how to drag over an element of your wireframe, apply a hotspot, and add a transition to another screen in your library.
InVision is best for early stage designing and user testing, and produces a low/mid-fidelity prototype for mobile or desktop. The animations are more basic than others on the market, so the actual user testing done with your prototypes will be basic as well. Worth noting that Invision Studio is a new tool that can bring your prototypes to a greater level of fidelity, so if you enjoy using their basic tool and want more—check it out.
Sketch was built with the designer in mind and supports you in creating vector-based designs and quickly viewing them as a clickable prototype.
Sketch is a beginner friendly application—and it may sound cliche—but its interface is really intuitive. The prototyping features available for your Sketch designs are pretty basic, as you can see from the highlighted portion of the panel above.
Sketch definitely isn’t the first program people think of when it comes to prototyping, and while it’s a dream to design wireframes, it really shines as a companion to other prototyping tools.
Your Sketch prototype will be clickable and simple. It has fewer transition customizations than Adobe XD or InVision, but they all similarly show how your screens flow with one another. Finally, you can view your prototype on your desktop browser or with the Mirror (iOS) app directly on your mobile device.
Figma is another full-stack design tool that has really sophisticated collaboration to support the design process from wireframing and prototyping all the way to developer handoff.
With a familiar looking interface, Figma is known to be an easy tool for designers to pick up and figure out—especially if you‘ve used Sketch before. There is no coding knowledge required to add interactivity to your designs in Figma.
Figma prototypes are basic and will present similar to the other click-through mid-fidelity prototypes we’ve discussed so far.
With real-time editing capabilities that mirror a multi-editor Google doc experience—your team will love working together with Figma.
Figma has all of the essential design tools you’d want from Sketch, and is equally intuitive to use. It’s easy to stitch wireframes into your prototype so you don’t need to worry about importing your designs as you continue your design process in a single tool.
Balsamiq is a rapid wireframing and prototyping tool that allows you to link your screens together to demonstrate simple user flows.
Balsamiq is simple to use and produces a product you would show your team early on to refine your user flows and content strategy—this tool will help you to layout your app and collect feedback before the designs go through any iterations.
These prototypes are a step above low-fidelity, as look like a digitized-paper prototype. Linking elements in a wireframe here works as a simple clickable prototype, with the only action available being a transition to another screen (no overlay, animations, or custom transitions). One neat thing to note—if you export your Balsamiq prototype as a PDF, the links you embed will still work!
You can invite peers to view your designs right from the platform via email, and collect feedback that is focused on the layout of content and interactions instead of small details.
Balsamiq may be the lowest-fidelity prototyping tool we’ll discuss today, but it certainly has personality! Don’t let the sketch aesthetic fool you into thinking Balsamiq’s platform isn’t well designed. While it may not be your first choice for dynamic prototypes, it is a great tool meant to start big picture UX/content conversations.
UXPin is another full stack UX platform which supports you from end-to-end in your design process, and specializes in creating high-fidelity interactive prototypes.
Although UXPin designs are code equipped, it does not require the same steep learning curve of a few of our other prototyping tools which require some coding knowledge (e.g. Webflow and Axure). The platform for editing your wireframes is similar to other popular tools in terms of layout, layers, and property editing panes.
Wow! UXPin delivers high-fidelity prototypes that I personally can’t differentiate from the real thing. Elaborate animations and conditional interactions which add logic to your design, really set the bar high. For example, during user testing your participant can enter their name in a text field, and when they submit their data—their name will appear in a greeting message on the next page. Conditional interactions are things like setting up password parameters that must be met in order for the user to continue to the next page in the prototype.
The platform is really built to support big teams and projects with its advanced project management and collaborative sharing features. There is also a way to categorize the input given by your team so you can clearly differentiate the source of technical and non-technical comments.
The upgraded version of UXPin allows for live screen sharing, commenting and importing from Sketch and Photoshop. Importing from Sketch and Photoshop is great because it keeps your sketch layers and assets intact, making it easier to add custom animations and interactions.
To help you in making your decision, UXPin actually has listed at the bottom of their site navigation, ‘UXPin vs. ____’, which compares their tool with almost every other prototyping tool we’ve mentioned in our list.
Although there are extra features to navigate with UXPin, there are hundreds of tutorials online and the end product is so impressive that it’s worth taking the time to learn.
Flinto is the prototyping tool designed for Mac users to create high-fidelity interactive experiences.
Flinto is pretty easy to pick up, and looks similar to Sketch’s layout. You don’t have to know any code to use Flinto, and they have a Youtube channel with tutorials—though it hasn’t been updated in almost a year. Other tools seem to be iterating and upgrading more often. Keep that in mind if you are planning to use it as your go-to tool.
Despite it not being one of the most popular tools I’ve come across, Flinto is great for presenting advanced animations, transitions, and gestures. The prototype you’ll come away with is high-fidelity and viewable on a mobile iOS device or your Mac desktop.
Flinto is able to import designs from both Sketch and Figma, but also gives you the tools to mockup your own designs or make changes to imported files. Others can view your prototype from a link once they download the previewing app for an iOS device.
Flinto is really focused on interaction design and presenting sophisticated animations, however, it isn’t as complete of a solution as other tools have become. It lacks collaborative capabilities and isn’t going to help with your developer handoff as much as others.
Some notable features include adding UI sound effects to your prototype, unique scrolling, and the ability to design your own animated transitions and micro-interactions. Screens 4 3 3 – access your computer remotely controls.
This unique prototyping tool was created by Facebook designers and has helped build products like Instagram and Messenger.
If you’re a beginner and haven’t used any prototyping/design applications before, this may be tricky to learn. There is an active support group on Facebook (obviously), but the tool could use some built-in onboarding. The Origami product page does offer tailored tutorials for people with a programming background and those from a design background—but you should still give yourself extra time to learn this tool.
At this time, Origami is only available for Mac, however the prototyping preview app they offer is available for iOS and Android so you can user test on any mobile device.
Origami can create prototypes with intricate interactions for your watch, mobile device, desktop or tablet. You can expect a high-fidelity prototype with some pretty sophisticated interactions to showcase. For example, Instagram’s image straightening feature, where the user can watch as the image and the degrees adjust while they drag their finger along a scale—the prototype exactly mimics the experience you get using the app.
Origami supports sharing your prototype or viewing it on a device with the application installed, but there aren’t any commenting or co-editing features at this time. However, Origami does collaborate with other tools like Sketch and Figma to help you import your design layers.
Origami’s platform is set up a bit different than our other tools. Although the layer organization is similar to Sketch, to add interactivity you will be creating ‘patches’ which show up on your canvas next to the prototype viewer. You’ll specify your interaction in one patch, connect that to a transition patch, and specify your destination in a third patch (as shown in the image above).
Opening up Origami for the first time was a bit intimidating, especially after being ‘taken by the hand’ by many of the other tools with their onboarding and built-in tutorial videos. There are videos on Origami’s website you can walk through, and a few on Youtube. This is a free tool, so I wouldn’t expect the same kind of attention to the beginner UX as other tools.
Framer focuses on smooth team collaboration and rich interactive prototyping.
While some have complained that Framer has a bit of a learning curve—the creators claim you can be up and running with basic knowledge in five minutes due to their new comprehensive onboarding. If you’ve used any Adobe tool you’ll recognize the mixture of coach marks and video onboarding. The tutorials actually play and pause automatically in your workspace each time you’re given a new step to try.
You can expect high-fidelity interactive prototypes with Framer, for an experience that’s as close to your final product as possible.
From multiplayer editing, inline commenting, to sharing your prototype in one click—Framer really delivers a great collaborative experience for teams. https://heremload815.weebly.com/open-mac-charger.html.
The Framer platform is familiar to Sketch and Adobe XD with its editing panels and layer organization. Framer is great for learning how a developer will receive your design work—for example, the platform allows you to organize similar components into ‘stacks’ that you can edit as a set—which is similar to how a design would be implemented with code.
The all-in-one UX platform that creates rich prototypes and supports quality developer handoff.
Axure’s platform is pretty intuitive and reminiscent of other visual design tools we’ve discussed here. You definitely don’t need to know how to code to create your prototype, but it would help you to know some basic front-end coding so you can understand the language used within the tool.
Axure can produce some of the high quality prototypes for mobile, desktop, or tablet.
Axure’s platform is drag and drop, and is reminiscent of Sketch. This tool is great for developer handoff and is regarded for the quality of the code it generates.
Creating your prototypes seems pretty simple, and can get more complex when you implement conditional logic on different triggers (i.e. play animation when page loads). You can also apply advanced animations to your components like show/hide or toggle states.
A very powerful prototyping tool that your development team will thank you for!
This is a tool that is designed for someone with basic development knowledge. While anyone can use it, you need to have a basic understanding of HTML5 and CSS. If you were a developer before a designer—Webflow will feel like home.
Webflow produces high-fidelity prototypes for websites or mobile experiences that generate all of the code necessary for your development team to implement your design seamlessly.
Webflow is set up with a shared dashboard for your whole team to access your prototypes and design files. Designed specifically for collaborative harmony with your dev team—Webflow automatically generates code that your developers can access as you build.
This platform was designed with developers in mind, so although you won’t have to write any code, you will need to understand basic HTML and CSS to understand the language used in the platform. For example, you can drag and drop design elements into your prototype, but they are all labeled as HTML tags (e.g. div block, column, container). Finally, you’ll want to understand how tags and classes work so you can change the styling of multiple elements at a time.
Your interaction panel contains trigger selection, which lets you specify what your trigger will be (e.g. click, scroll, or page loading). Dupe away 3 0 9. It also contains the animation timeline which specifies what will occur during those triggers at what time(e.g. scroll animation that follows the speed of your scroll).
While all of these tools will help you create a working prototype, there is bound to be one that suits your needs better. As we’ve seen, the type of prototyping tool you’ll use depends on the goals of your prototype, what kind of team you’re working with, and what skills you already possess. Here are a few statements that summarize the main differences we tackled in the article:
If you’ve settled on a tool and are interested in learning more about prototyping, check out these articles from our blog:
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