15 tools product designers can't live without

From conceptualization to prototyping and user testing to implementation, a product designer’s job description includes a lot of responsibilities. The right tools will help a digital product designer handle visual design, prototyping, product management, testing, and even collaboration with design team members, executives, and stakeholders involved in the product design process. In today's world, there's a tool for almost any team size. Many of the tools mentioned below offer custom pricing options tailored to the number of monthly active users on a platform, providing flexibility to meet specific needs.

In this chapter, we share 15 of the top product design tools. All the tools mentioned help product design teams create better experiences faster and easier. Before we look at the tools, let's take a quick look at the different ways these tools assist teams and processes.

How product design tools help the design process

Streamline your design process with automation

Leveraging automation in your design process isn’t just about saving time—it’s about freeing your team to focus on what matters most. By automating repetitive tasks with the right product design tools, you streamline your workflow, making the entire process more efficient and effective.

An efficient design process means fewer errors and, ultimately, lower costs. By reducing the likelihood of mistakes and streamlining workflows with effective design tools, you can deliver high-quality products while staying within budget.

Enhance collaboration in real-time

Today’s top product design tools offer real-time collaboration features, allowing your team to work together seamlessly, no matter where they are. Whether you’re using a project management tool or design tool, everyone can contribute simultaneously, helping you move projects forward faster and more cohesively.

Maintain visual consistency with design systems

Consistency is key to a strong brand presence. Design systems and components help ensure your visuals remain unified across every project and product. With all the features available in modern tools, you can maintain a polished and professional look, when working with vector graphics.

Create interactive prototypes

Interactive prototypes are essential for ongoing research and discovery. The right design tools make it easy to create interactive prototypes, allowing you to test your designs and deliver a more user-friendly final product through thorough user testing.

Make quick adjustments with prototyping tools

Speed is crucial in the product development process. Prototyping tools that enable quick adjustments and improvements keep your projects agile, allowing you to iterate rapidly and avoid the pitfalls of limited features that could slow you down.

Ensure a smooth handoff with integrated tools

Transitioning from design to development is a critical phase. Design tools that integrate seamlessly with development platforms reduce the risk of misunderstandings and errors, ensuring a smoother, more effective handoff and better overall project outcomes.

Design for inclusivity and accessibility

Accessibility is more than a trend—it’s a necessity. Many design tools come equipped with features that help you create products that are inclusive and accessible, ensuring your digital experiences are open to all users.

Learn and grow with active communities

The best tools come with the best support. Active user communities surrounding your chosen design tools provide a wealth of knowledge, helping you troubleshoot issues, share insights, and continue learning, ensuring you’re always up to speed with the latest in product design.

With that out of the way, let's get into the list. We've separated the tools by the design stages in which they're strongest. But of course, several of these tools could belong under more than one category.

For instance, as you saw in a previous chapter, UserTesting is a unique end-to-end solution that applies to every stage of the product design process. To keep things short, however, we've included it under the user research section.

Best product design tools for user research

UserTesting

User research and understanding user behavior are vital aspects of product design. In order to build repeatable success with your product design team, you need an end-to-end solution for gathering user feedback. UserTesting is an all-in-one platform that gives design teams the tools they need to conduct remote usability testing with their ideal user personas. You're able to gather feedback and insights from test users (contributors as we call them) through tasks, surveys, and video recordings. 

Best product design tools for ideation

Balsamiq

Specializing in low-fidelity mockups, Balsamiq is a wireframing and prototyping tool for sketching out UI concepts and workflows quickly and intuitively. Designers can rapidly generate and iterate on ideas to visualize product concepts early in the design process, allowing for actionable feedback on product designs.

Miro

Miro is a versatile digital whiteboard tool packed with collaborative features to fuel the creative process. Miro helps facilitate brainstorming sessions, customer journey maps, and collaborative design work throughout the product development process. It provides a digital canvas where professional web designers (or any team) can work together in real-time, regardless of location, making it ideal for remote and distributed teams. Miro offers a range of templates for wireframing, journey mapping, and strategic planning, enabling designers to visualize and organize ideas efficiently throughout the design thinking process. With its robust set of features, Miro enhances the workflow of any design project.

Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use online platform that's great for graphic design tasks. But it isn't just a product designer tool—it's specifically designed to be accessible to all sorts of different roles. Canva offers an extremely user friendly interface along with an array of reusable design templates, images, fonts, and design elements. With it, users can create professional-quality visual content, such as presentations, social media graphics, posters, and documents, with a simple drag-and-drop interface. 

Whimsical

Whimsical is a design platform offering flow charts, wireframes, mind maps, and docs, all integrated into one environment. It comes with templates to create user personas, meeting notes, and project management, streamlining the ideation process and promoting effective collaboration among teams.

Best product design tools for prototyping

Figma

One of the most popular design tools on the market, Figma is an interface design and collaboration tool that users can access through a web browser (or Mac app), enabling collaboration on design files among multiple users. It empowers the entire product design process with features for interface design, creating prototypes, and code generation. Figma also has a free basic plan that offers unlimited cloud storage.

Figma's browser-based nature and real-time collaboration features make it essential for modern design workflows. Designers use Figma to create UI wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, collaborate with team members, share designs with stakeholders, and gather real-time feedback.

Adobe Creative Cloud

There are few bigger names in design software than Adobe Creative Cloud. A longstanding go-to design platform, Adobe offers a subscription-based suite of comprehensive software applications and services packed with programs for product design, graphic design, video editing, and photography. It gives users access to industry-standard tools (like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and XD) to create and edit various forms of digital content. Design teams often leverage Photoshop, a raster graphics editor known (and well-loved) for its robust features in photo editing, digital artwork creation, and graphic design. Its comprehensive toolkit includes layers, masks, filters, and drawing tools, giving users the ability to manipulate images and create designs with precision.

Principle

Principle is a Mac-based prototyping design tool designed for creating interactive user interface animations and transitions. It enables UX designers to prototype and demonstrate user interactions and animations within their designs. Thanks to its ability to simulate realistic user experiences, designers use Principle to refine and test designs before actually building them.

Axure

Axure is a powerful tool for creating interactive prototypes ranging from low-fidelity sketches to high-fidelity mockups. It offers robust prototyping features, including dynamic panels and adaptive views, making it ideal for UX designers who need to create complex interactions and workflows within a design project.

Marvel

Marvel is a cloud-based tool for wireframing and prototyping, ideal for creating realistic multi-device app prototypes quickly. It’s user-friendly and allows for easy collaboration, making it perfect for teams that need to visualize their ideas across different devices and mobile web browsers.

Sketch

Sketch is a versatile and intuitive vector-based design tool primarily used in the Mac environment. It assists designers in quickly progressing from ideation to production by providing powerful tools for creating UI/UX designs, wireframes, and high-fidelity mockups. Sketch's built-in prototyping capabilities and robust library of plugins make it a valuable asset for any design team, especially large projects that require detailed design systems and seamless collaboration between designers and developers.

Best product design tools for performance tracking

Hotjar

Hotjar is a staple for web design, providing tools to monitor user behavior on your website. It features heatmaps, session recordings, on-site widgets to gather feedback, and surveys to deepen your research, offering a comprehensive view of how users interact with your designs.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that allows designers to track user interactions, set custom metrics, and analyze user behavior in real-time. It helps teams measure the impact of design changes and optimize the user experience based on data-driven insights.

Pendo

Pendo focuses on understanding user behavior through analytics, offering features like retention tracking, paths and funnels, and product engagement scoring. It’s particularly useful for measuring the effectiveness of your designs and understanding how users navigate through your product, especially in complex projects.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides valuable insights into user behavior, such as views, clicks, bounce rates, and conversions. This data helps product designers understand how users engage with their designs and identify areas for improvement.