Overall Satisfaction with Sketch
Sketch solves prototyping interactive products. This is either to get buy-in from stakeholders, or to show the intent of what a product will be for developers. Sketch helps us quickly visualize a design and rapidly iterate. It's being utilized by our UX and UI designers primarily, but the deliverables of Sketch are utilized by a wider range of the organization for communication purposes.
- High fidelity interactive mockups.
- Very user-friendly interface for a design program.
- Incredibly competitive price point, especially when compared to Adobe.
- Sketch hasn't innovated in a while. They used to be a leader here, but have slowed down and are now playing catch-up to other design programs.
- Being made for Mac only is extremely limiting.
- Working on their design system is a pretty poor experience compared to alternatives.
- Sketch played a huge role for a while, assisting with UX deliverables in a large way, as it made the industry much more nimble.
- We experienced better stakeholder sign-off on concepts.
- We experienced more clarity on developer handoff.
Ultimately I did not select Sketch, but for a while, it was the software of choice over Photoshop or Illustrator. Photoshop was never a good fit for prototyping, as it's made for intense photo editing and has a lot of UI debt that's built up. It also facilitated a particular workflow that idealized pixel perfect design in a way that was unproductive. Figma has caught up with Sketch for features and has the competitive advantage of being built on a collaborative platform, so it wins out in my mind.