Best Prototyping Tools for UX Designers

As a new or experienced UX designer, you know that creating a quality prototype is an important part of the UX design process. Prototyping tools can be used to design and support early user testing and basic demonstration of user flows. They allow you to simulate realistic and rich user interactions, collaborate with your team, and generate code that is ready to hand off to developers.

While there a lot of Prototyping tools on the market I’m going to cover the four I consider being best in class.

Figma

Figma is a full-stack design tool that has really sophisticated collaboration to support the design process from wireframing and prototyping all the way to developer handoff.

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 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.

My favorite aspect of Figma is it allows real-time editing capabilities that mirror a multi-editor Google doc experience.

Adobe XD

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.

You can easily create your wireframes in the design tab, then easily switch to prototype and add start linking your components together.

You are 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!

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!

Framer

Framer focuses on smooth team collaboration and rich interactive prototyping.

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. However, the downside to Framer is that it has a steeper learning curve compared to XD & Figma.

Axure

The all-in-one UX platform creates rich prototypes and supports quality developer handoff.

Axure’s platform is semi-intuitive and reminiscent of other visual design tools. 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.

Creating your prototypes seems pretty simple, but 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.

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. Out of all the prototyping tools, I feel Axure is the most robust, but the learning curve is the steepest.

Conclusion

While all of these tools will help you create a working prototype, there is bound to be one that suits your needs better.

• If you are comfortable working with code and want to showcase the highest-fidelity prototypes — use Axure
• If you regularly hand off your prototypes and designs to developers but don’t know much about code — use Framer.
• If most of your time will be spent designing the wireframes to perfection with a little prototyping — use Adobe XD or Figma.