Creativity matters, the tool doesn’t!
Situation
UX designers defend design tools the same way fan bois defend tech companies and their products. The company doesn’t care if you support one or multiple products.
Design tools matter less than what you think. I came across some designers who asked me which tool I use for designing and I was greeted with this same response from more than half of them:
Why aren’t you using XYZ tool? It’s so good than ABC tool in terms of [some common features]. You should definitely switch!
Why?
Unless the tool limits you from either creating something, doesn’t support your device or genuinely lacks a feature which hinders your design pace you should be good to use pretty much any design tool which is commonly used.
When it finally struck me I thought of making an App UX design using 4 design tools. Technically, each of them aren’t design tools. Framer & Invision serve the purpose of a prototyping tool primarily but still can be used for designing the prototypes.
About
Don’t forget these are tools which are developed and maintained by big companies which don’t care about your opinion when adding/removing/changing a feature in their product. It means nothing is certain and if you stick to only one tool you might limit yourself to only the features which that tool offers.
Also, using a design tool isn’t a skill. It’s just good practice to display them in your portfolio to depict how strong you’re with the tool.
My Approach
The UX which I have attached above is from my Linkedin post where I had posted the initial release of the UX design.
Below are the links of all the design tools in which I have recreated the same UX. So, as it will be quite visible that design tools don’t matter if you have to create a complete UI/UX for an App/Website.
NOTE: I have excluded Sketch and other design tools because I haven’t used them personally so if I use them in future I’ll update the article.
Figma: https://www.figma.com/proto/0jotWkvhsEaXswDlcFQxvw/AppTest?node-id=3%3A2&viewport=336%2C193%2C0.4479730725288391&scaling=scale-down
Adobe Xd: https://xd.adobe.com/view/1a8a7198-2891-4b5b-ac25-c0adbed7479c-4fd9/?fullscreen
Framer: https://framer.com/share/AppTest--3oXvGdUL3WiWadumKcff
Invision: https://sunitshirke399831.invisionapp.com/console/share/HU1NFT328E/483961260
How do the “Giants” do it?
Companies or rather design teams can pretty much do anything from sticking to a particular tool to using many tools in their design process because they have a lot of things to factor in to create a great design like dev handoff, presentation features, access sharing, team collaboration, pricing and many more.
Conclusion
- Stop depending on tools to be creative.
- Always try everything and then choose a tool according to your use case or whatever suits you best.
- Follow design principles.
- Adapt to new design tools.
- Keep on building your design knowledge from various sources.
The only tool which I don’t change for whiteboarding is Excalidraw which kind of serves the purpose of UX in a lighter way. It’s not a prototyping tool but definitely worth trying.
PS: You can follow companies like Zomato, Uber, Google for a good understanding of design principles.
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