Figma had the most powerful features for custom built development. UXPin is still a good out of the box choice for teams that don't want to build or maintain their own library, but Figma is what we needed to build and present a new custom UI for our product.
InVision and Figma are quite similar in terms of feature set and capabilities. While InVision is more popular for prototyping, the user experience on Figma is just a lot simpler and smooth. Sketch on the other hand, while being great didn't offer as many collaboration options …
The first thing I’ll say is the learning curve is way lighter on UXPin. Also UXPin updates their app, and performance routinely and adds new features based on community needs.
It’s the first web-based tool that outputs code rendered in the browser from a design created in a …
A solo developer or small team that wants to integrate development, feature planning and ui design in a single app can find a lot of value in using Figma, since the FigJam whiteboard and UI editor are in the same app. Business plans and software features can be mapped out on FigJam and then implemented in the UI editor, that way there is reduced context switching and teams can operate smoothly without having to toggle between multiple apps.
UXPin is an excellent resource for creating website and app flows and to better help our clients understand how their websites and apps will function. It also gives them a visual reference and some real-life application. It can be difficult for clients to truly understand how a website or an app flows from one page or screen to another via a phone call or web conference. UXPin helps us to illustrate these flows in a hands-on, visual format. UXPin also helps our clients understand the purpose of a sitemap. We used to send our clients a sitemap in an outline format. While many understood that the top-level items on the outline were the main navigation of their website and other items were child pages, several did not. We have found that using UXPin to show the main level navigation, how in-page navigation and child pages (drop-down menus from the main navigation) work has been an integral step in getting approval on sitemaps.
As a visual designer, I spend 90% of my working time in Figma. So, as a design tool, Figma is mature and feature-rich. It covers all the basic needs and provides extras, such as simple prototyping and the ability to use external plugins.
Collaboration: It’s very easy to work together on the same file in Figma. You can easily brainstorm together or use Figma as a shared screen.
Smartness of components: Figma provides many adaptability options for components that allow building very flexible and scalable layouts.
Smart elements are super nice because they allow me to create complicated features that will appear on every page. When the client wants to change something it is very easy to do so in one place.
Working on grid is important to me. Having the ability to change and manipulate that grid in UXPin is just what I need.
There are tons of add on features like Font Awesome icons and prebuilt stuff that not only looks great, but also just lets me get ideas across fast without committing to what the final design is going to look like.
I love the ability to edit things if I want. I can control several details, but it's not too overwhelming. They include various font options from Google fonts as well. You can design as much or as little as you want. The interface doesn't get in the way. It's there if you want it but has a simplicity that is nice.
Having a link on a live webpage is a necessity. As soon as you make changes, they are live. No more worrying about which is the latest version.
I'm a photoshop user so it has a few keyboard commands that are familiar like hold 'alt', click and drag to duplicate is nice!
Access control - it wasn't apparent to me at first that a project was shared with everyone in the company vs just people i choose to share it with. I think the inverse should be the default.
Sometimes it struggles to import old sketch files - no clue how to make this better, but its frustrating
No search and replace for fonts (missing or just to replace).
Tool is built for design/dev teams but does not integrate content teams in well.
If you are not careful you can get lost in designing interactions when you should be just creating building blocks - don’t over animate!!!
There is currently no “scrub” or click-drag interaction which limits touch capability testing/concepts.
Editing adaptive versions of designs is very time consuming, edits to not ripple through from master viewport size. All updates are manual, even when creating an adaptive version.
When a library item is updated, it can revert changes you have made unknowingly.
Video integration is limited to online video host aggregators such as IMGR, YouTube, and Vimeo.
Not a ton of info for a designer on how to use the expressions effectively.
Prototypes with a lot of interactions can get slow, especially on computers with a lot of security software. It’s best to work with UXPin to figure out what is blocking APIs, and JS.
We'll definitely continue to use UXPin. Right now it provides us with everything we need in order to deliver quality projects to our clients. If at any point in time, UXPin doesn't provide us with what we need, we'll start vetting other software out there that may be similar. My guess is that UXPin will continue to make updates and improvements so we'll likely stick with it for quite some time.
It's so simple to use! I have no background in UI design but basic designing and I was able to learn this software Figma within 3-5 days. There are tons of tutorials available on Youtube from so many popular YouTubers in the space, you can just go through them and start designing.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
As far as I know, my teams have only had to use the UXPin support once. The experience went really well. We just needed a bit of assistance with using the Documentation feature. UXPin's support was quick and helped my team in a matter of minutes. We will definitely reach out to their support without hesitation in the future.
Much more intuitive, Adobe XD fails to keep up with the newest market changes thus it did not let us stay on top of the technology. The big plus of Figma is that the majority of our clients worked with it, whereas it was not the case with Adobe XD. You can get similar results working with both, but the process will be different in Figmas favour
Adobe XD is so much more than UXPin, with Adobe Cloud you can easily share designs as well. We used Adobe XD before changing to UXPin. At first UXPin seems so advanced and helpful, but don't get fooled. You're heavily limited in the long run, and after all the training and implementation of UXPin (both app-wise for IT but also training designers etc) it is not worth your time.
Saving money by using one tool for lo-fi wireframing, high fidelity wireframing, prototyping, and user testing, rather than four separate tools.
The ability to create and use team libraries enables us to create visually consistent designs with less effort than creating every single design from scratch, which allows us to save considerable time (and therefore money!)
In-platform collaboration saves our team a lot of time and energy. With everything in one place (wireframes, prototypes, user feedback, collaboration comments), we can all be on the same page about the design workflow and pinpoint discussion points that are based on up-to-date designs.
