15+ Best Resources for UI/UX Teams

15+ Best Resources for UI/UX Teams

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design are crucial for creating engaging, user-friendly digital products and services. As a UI/UX team, having the right resources and tools at your disposal can significantly impact your efficiency and effectiveness. This comprehensive guide explores the best resources for UI/UX teams across several key categories.

Design Inspiration Resources

Finding fresh sources of design inspiration is integral to any UI/UX designer's workflow. Suitable inspirational sites can spark creative ideas and perspectives. Here are some go-to resources for design inspiration:

Dribbble

Dribbble is one of the largest communities showcasing UI/UX work from designers worldwide. The platform allows designers to upload screenshots, GIFs, and videos highlighting their designs and web/app projects.

With over two million monthly visitors, Dribbble offers a never-ending visual stream of app interfaces, websites, illustrations, iconography, typography, and more to ignite creative thinking. Some key perks:

• Huge volume and variety of contemporary design work
• Established designers and agencies sharing projects
• Galleries and player profiles to follow top talent
• Keyword and colour search to find specific designs
• Popular shots and weekly playoffs to discover trends

Behance

Behance acts as an online portfolio platform for the creative community. UI/UX designers utilise Behance to showcase completed projects in their portfolios through case studies.

Compared to Dribbble's focus on snapshots, Behance allows designers to provide more context, description, and process around their work in a portfolio format. Key features include:

• In-depth project profiles from start to finish
• Creative fields like UI, UX, product design, 3D
• Ability to follow top talents and agencies
• Articles and podcasts on design
• Job listings and hiring talent support

Designspiration

As another robust mood board tool, Designspiration allows UI/UX designers to save, categorise, and organise visual inspiration for later use. Useful highlights include:

• Curation of designs across mobile, web, artwork
• Public and private boards to collate images
• Browser plugins to easily save inspiration
• Discover page for daily design ideas
• Related imagery recommendations

Prototyping & Wireframing Tools

Prototyping is an integral step in the UI/UX process before any visual design or development work. Building a clickable, interactive prototype allows designers, clients, and stakeholders to experience and test ideas without investing heavily in the final UI.

Here are some top prototyping tools for UI/UX teams:

Figma

As an all-in-one UI/UX design platform, Figma provides robust prototyping capabilities and core features like interface design, collaboration, and libraries. Key prototyping perks include:

• Clickable prototypes mirror user flow
• Layer toggles, overlays, components
• Prototype-specific transitions and interactions
• Real-time collaboration allows for testing
• Inspect mode to view designs like a prototype
• Embed prototypes on any web page

With all features in one place, Figma saves UI/UX teams from toggling between apps during design.

Adobe XD

As another leading all-in-one tool, Adobe XD boasts mature prototyping features. Standout qualities include:

• Trigger interactions with auto-animate
• Drag-and-drop user flows from sitemap
• Transition presets like dissolve, push, slide
• Interactive element triggers like tap, voice, swipe
• Repeat grid for reusable component layouts
• Test on mobile Preview app or browser

Like Figma, Adobe XD allows UI/UX designers to stay within one ecosystem from design to prototype.

InVision

Known originally as a prototyping tool, InVision has expanded into an end-to-end UI/UX platform over recent years. Notable prototyping strengths include:

• Web and mobile prototypes and animations
• Design version history and changelog
• Real-time collaboration and comment threads
• Link Dev platforms to engineer specs automatically
• Transitions tied to gestures like tap, swipe, drag
• Inspector panel to adjust interactions visually

InVision remains a mature destination focused specifically on prototyping during the UI/UX workflow.

Wireframe.cc

As a lighter online wireframing tool, Wireframe.cc provides an efficient way to draft and share user flows early in the UI/UX process. Useful features include:

• Drag-and-drop templates and widgets
• Style presets like iOS, Material Design
• Comment threads for sharing user flows
• Export PNGs or PDFs of wireframes
• Library of mobile and web UI patterns
• Automatic sitemaps from user flow diagrams

For rapid ideation and workshopping early-stage concepts, Wireframe.cc delivers solid value in a freemium tool.

Design Systems Resources

Design systems establish standards for colours, fonts, branding, components like buttons and cards, and patterns around navigation and workflows. Maintaining an ambitious design system is a challenging task. These resources help streamline the process:

Material Design

Created by Google, Material Design provides well-documented and maintained open-source design guidance around the layout, navigation patterns, components, colour, motion, and responsive principles.

With Google products implementing Material Design extensively, having detailed specs to reference helps maintain consistency for UI/UX teams adopting Material in their digital products.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

For native iOS applications, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines cover the hallmarks of quality iOS design across various device sizes and interaction methods. The guides address:

• Design principles focused on clarity and deference
• Template files like Sketch and Adobe XD
• Recommendations on navigation patterns
• Native components like pickers, switches, alerts
• Dark mode and app architecture advice
• Accessibility guidance like text sizes and colour contrast

Using Apple's interface guides ensures alignment with users' expectations around iOS navigation and usability.

Ant Design

Created by Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, Ant Design is an increasingly popular open-source design system for crafting consistent web applications. The system includes:

• 1500+ UI components for web-based apps
• Four official design values and principles
• Style guide covering colour, typography, spacing
• Guidelines tailored for data visualisation
• Resources in Sketch, Axure, Figma, Adobe XD

Ant Design provides comprehensive guidance in a mature design system for UI/UX teams building complex web tools and dashboards.

User Research Tools

Understanding user behaviours, needs, preferences, and pain points through consistent research is core to designing interfaces that solve real-world problems. Dedicated user research tools assist with tasks like recruitment, remote user tests, concept validation, analytics, and more:

Validately

A capable research platform, Validately offers solutions tailored to early-stage design testing and more advanced quantitative analyses. Noteworthy features include:

• Recruit target user groups based on demographics
• Schedule moderated or automated tests
• Integrate prototypes and tasks into tests
• View session recordings and highlight critical moments

Focusing solely on user research, Validately caters well to research teams of all sizes and budgets.

Reframer

With tests built into its core platform, ReFramer provides robust quantitative analysis through metrics like first-click tests, heatmaps, and aggregated findings across multiple rounds of testing. Benefits include:

• Seamlessly test high-fidelity prototypes
• Aggregate results from repeat tests
• Analyse engagement metrics like clicks, errors
• Custom branding and advanced reporting
• Schedule remote moderated sessions

For more advanced analytics as designs mature, ReFramer delivers enterprise-level quantitative rigour.

Hotjar

On the qualitative side, Hotjar generates insightful user session recordings, heatmaps, funnels, and surveys from live websites and applications. Useful perks:

• User session recordings show detailed behaviours
• Form and funnel analysis exposes drop-off points
• Polls gather firsthand preference feedback
• Integration with 3000+ other platforms
• The free plan includes most core features

For gathering direct user feedback on live products, Hotjar remains a trusted industry choice.

Design Collaboration Tools

Smooth collaboration across team members and stakeholders ensures an efficient project workflow for UI/UX teams. Specialised tools for design-focused partnerships include:

Figma

With its real-time multiplayer workflow, Figma allows multiple stakeholders to view and inspect live file iterations seamlessly. Impactful features:

• Simultaneous editing abilities
• Built-in commenting tools
• Version history to track all changes
• Multi-page slide deck creation
• Libraries to manage components
• Multi-channel community forums

Figma primes environments for transparent collaboration during the design process.

Miro

Miro empowers agile and design teams to ideate through virtual whiteboarding jam sessions, user story maps, journey maps, affinity diagrams, and more. Standouts:

• Customisable templates
• Arc diagram automation based on inputs
• Guided site mapping features
• Real-time video chat ability embedded
• Layer locking to prevent interfering

For asynchronous and real-time collaboration, Miro leads a design workshop environment.

InVision

With features catering to team collaboration, InVision maintains its strength in connecting designers, engineers, and product leaders to streamline workflows. Advantages include:

• View, comment, and inspect live prototypes together
• Seamlessly transition to developer handoff
• Rock-solid version control tools
• Share links to progress or specific screens
• PM workspace tailored for road mapping

Tested over the years, facilitating design review processes at enterprises, InVision offers reliable collaboration tailor-made for UI/UX teams.

Conclusion

By leveraging the diverse resources covered across inspirational sites, prototyping tools, design systems, research platforms, and collaboration apps, UI/UX teams can empower more impactful design processes and outputs. Relying on the right mix of resources appropriate for your skill level, budget, team structure, and product goals can exponentially elevate a UI/UX practice.

Stay tuned for future updates highlighting the latest and best tools shaping the UI/UX landscape in the coming years. The design world is dizzying, so take advantage of these resources in your workflow today!

Tools for UI/UX Teams FAQs