 In this video we're going to take a look at some of the best UX tools for designers. There are hundreds of tools out there so I'm only going to talk about the ones which I've personally used. The great thing about most of them is the free or they offer a free trial and you can get up and running quickly. Let's start with my favourite design tool, Figma. Head on over to figment.com and sign up today. The best thing is for you that it's 100% free. Figma is used mainly for UI designs, designing websites and apps. I use Figma for all of my design work and prototypes. The prototyping is built into the tool itself and is really easy to learn. If I'm designing a website I'll put together a detailed prototype of all the pages in Figma and share this with the rest of the team to get feedback. Figma produces a shareable URL for the prototype. This doesn't share any of the design assets, just a clickable prototype. When you work as a UX designer there will normally be other designers that you work with and Figma is really good for collaboration and sharing design files. With the free version up to two designers can work on the same file at the same time and for collaboration this is great. One of the great things about Figma is that it's opened up its software to extensions in the community tab and you'll find lots of great resources. The Reven fully completed design systems to get you started. One other thing I found really useful about Figma is that you can import design files from other tools. This saves you re-creating all your artwork and it normally does a great job. I've put together some tutorials where I walk through creating a website in Figma and if you're interested the link's in the description. Adobe XD is Figma's biggest rival. You can find it over at adobe.com forward slash products forward slash XD. XD again is free for personal use and for professionals and small teams it has a small monthly cost. I've used both XD and Figma and there isn't much to choose either way. They're both really good. The benefit of Adobe XD is that it's created by Adobe and they have an amazing track history with design tools. You can guarantee that XD is going to keep getting updated regularly and is going to get better over time. Within XD you can create designs, prototypes and has really good integration with the other Adobe tools. If you're familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator or Premiere this may be the best for you. There really is no in-the-suit-standard UI prototyping tool and it's up to you and your colleagues which one works best. As a side note, if you're keen to get started with either Figma or Adobe XD I have a full UX design course with plenty of example projects where we walk through and design websites in both tools over at AnthonyCombo.com. I'll mention more about this later but it's got everything you need to start designing today and some great example projects for you to work along with. Sketch is another UI design tool similar to Figma and XD. You can download a 30-day free trial over at Sketch.com. Unlike XD and Figma, Sketch is Mac only and once the free trial over there is a one-time fee for the software. This is still great value and I know plenty of teams who still use Sketch. A couple of years back I used Sketch to design Barclays.co.uk and the tool was great. It was one of the pioneers for digital design tools specific for UI design. Sketch has prototyping built-in and some great calibration features. The Mirror Mode is great where you can preview your mobile or tablet design right on your device. One of the best things about Sketch is the developer hand-off where you can share your design with a single link. The developers can open this link and check it out in a browser. They can inspect elements and even export assets. This is extremely useful in a real-world project environment. If you have time check out all three and see which one works best for you. There is no right or wrong and they're all pretty similar to use. You won't have trouble using one over the other and you'll pretty soon get the hang of things. Now that you have your UI designs it's time to test it out. Check out Usability Hub. This is one of my favourite online user testing platforms. You can sign up today and try it for free and see what different type of tests they offer. If you were designing something simple like a logo for example you could set up a preference test. This is where you show multiple variations of the same design and ask a user to choose which one they prefer. It's a great way to get lots of quick feedback on something which is a straight up choice. If you have an email list then you can send out a link to the test and the feedback will normally come quite quickly. It's a really good way to provide evidence for any design decisions and base your choice on data. If you don't have an existing audience to send your test out to Usability Hub have a panel of over 170,000 users that you can recruit for a dollar a response. You can target this audience on things like age, gender, education and get quite specific on who the target audience is. Design surveys help you make confident decisions by collecting user feedback. You can ask multiple choice questions and even show your design when the question is displayed. This way you can ask the user about certain elements on your page. Another test you can run on Usability Hub is a first click test. This is where you ask the user to perform a task and then show them your design. Usability Hub will then provide a heat map so you can see where users clicked. This is awesome to see if you've got the placement right for important elements and make sure your site is easy to navigate. You also get a breakdown of how long users took to make this click so looking at the speed lets you know if this is an intuitive location. If you already have a website then CrazyEgg is an unbelievable tool that will help you understand how users interact with your site. For every new site I build I get CrazyEgg in store from day one. This way I can make sure the site is behaving like it should and any problems will be quickly discovered. CrazyEgg tracks user sessions as they browse your site and allow you to watch them back. It provides heat maps of where users viewed and clicked. Nothing beats watching a user interact with your product and it gives you a different viewpoint. By watching multiple sessions you will soon see a pattern of how users behave. Users may not view entire section of your content that you may have put a lot of time to and they also may miss the main call to action on the page. By watching sessions and discovering these flaws you can improve your site and repeat. Another amazing tool is A-Beat testing. CrazyEgg can analyse your website and allow you to offer the users who visit your site to slide variations. A-Beat testing is the survival of the fittest in the digital world. If you can generate more sales for your business by changing the colour of a button or an image choice then this is game changing. CrazyEgg handles all of this for you and you can make the changes via the interface pretty simply. At the end of the test you'll get a breakdown of which variation won. You need to define before you do the test what success is such as purchases or clicks to a certain page but this one is one of my favourites. I've put a link in the description and the guidebook to one of my favourite articles about A-Beat testing. This is from the 2008 director of analytics at the Obama campaign entitled How Obama Raised 60 Million by Running a Single Experiment and it's a great read. It details the test they ran on Barack Obama's website for the US presidential campaign for sign-up rates and they tested two things. The wedding on the button and an image. By creating a multivariant test they randomly combined these two factors and discovered that they actually performed quite differently. The winning combination helped boost sign-up rates by 40%. That's an extra 2.8 million emails and according to the article each email on average donated $21 to the campaign which translated into an additional 60 million in donations. This test could have changed history.