Sketch is an excellent tool for creating wireframes with custom symbols you can share quickly across your organization
March 14, 2019

Sketch is an excellent tool for creating wireframes with custom symbols you can share quickly across your organization

Albert Ellenich | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sketch

Sketch is used by the UX department only, which consists of 2 of us. We use it extensively for fast comps to illustrate possible UI ideas and layouts for our company's web-based software products. It serves as a tool for us to visualize ideas we can share in larger groups, making it much easier for stakeholders to provide useful feedback and additional requirements. "A picture is worth a thousand words" right? In this case, Sketch lets us make those pictures to gather intel and then create final wireframes of every aspect of our systems. The flexibility of its symbols allows us to quickly create visual ideas without a lot of manual object creation. And the ability to sync our sketch pages to a project on InVision is invaluable to us in collecting feedback and keeping a living version of our products online for constant improvement.
  • The ability to create a custom symbol library and/or download available libraries for free or purchase make Sketch incredibly versatile and fast. Sketch eliminates the need for creating form fields and other UI elements by hand before using them in wireframe layouts. This saves so much time! The flexibility of symbols in Sketch allows for easily creating multiple width views of pages for responsive design.
  • Nesting symbols in sketch provide the ultimate flexibility in creating product UIs that have variations throughout a system. Nesting allows you to change aspects of a symbol on a per-instance need as opposed to forcing the creation of a unique symbol every time you need to display something a little different.
  • Multiple canvases on a page allow for creating multiple views of the same page based on conditional variables. Or for responsive design. There's no need to flip between pages in Sketch to do this. You can see multiple views as canvases in the same Sketch page. This helps greatly in keeping your Sketch files organized when you are dealing with a large system.
  • One of the key benefits to my work is Sketch's ability to work with 3rd party plug-ins and extensions. This allows me to immediately sync a single canvas or collection of canvases on a page with InVision, a tool my company uses to house all our UX documentation for feedback from stakeholders.
  • The Sketch interface can feel a bit clumsy when you're working with a document that has many pages. As an example, I regularly work in a document that captures 10 different aspects of a product. Sketch doesn't allow me to organize all those pages into any type of folder hierarchy. I have to scroll through the complete list of pages to try and find the page I want. You can drag pages into a different order in Sketch, but that doesn't remove the lengthy list or provide visual demarcation between groups of related pages.
  • Nested symbols are extremely useful, but the interface available on the right panel of the screen to manipulate a nested symbol in a canvas is not clearly organized to find what you're looking for quickly. It displays as a list of items in your nested symbol with no visual delineation between objects, so it can be a bit of guesswork to make sure you're making changes to the correct element.
  • It would be nice if Sketch offered the ability to create a workflow with automatic connection of objects via lines and arrows, like a sitemap or process flow. I use Sketch to create all my screens, but still need to leave the app to create my visual diagrams in a separate app.
  • A fresh take on the UI to better delineate things visually would be a great help. As mentioned, pages can't be organized, nested symbols are cumbersome to read through, etc. Separating the main central area of the app where canvases are displayed visually from the tools on the left and right would make for a cleaner work environment.
  • Sketch has had a positive impact on the amount of time my team needs to spend in meetings gathering feedback. By creating screen views in Sketch and posting to our InVision projects, we're able to collect feedback without requiring multi-person meetings.
  • Sketch is an extremely affordable price point with many free and inexpensive add-on options that allow me to work the way I want without spending a lot of money on additional products.
Sketch is designed for a specific need, in my opinion, creating screen designs with tools you can reuse and share across a project. There are no extra features to get in your way or slow you down. Other products I've used are good at creating the same type of work products, but come with extra features I don't need, at a cost I don't want to pay, and with a cluttered interface of things I don't need.

I chose Sketch for the main use of creating wireframes. It does this well with its intentional design of canvases and advanced symbol features. Its focus has been on this task over several updates and continues to be a product I can rely on.
Sketch is well suited for the following:
  • Quick mockups of UI ideas to gather feedback
  • Creating custom UI elements you can reuse throughout your project or share as a library with collaborators
  • Full UI comps which can be used via sync for feedback in InVision or within AdobeXP for prototype creation
  • Creating responsive systems requiring multiple size views of a screen
Sketch is less suited for creating system diagrams and workflows with connections that are maintained and automatically flow as objects are moved around on the screen.