UXPin has my vote for being the best tool for wire framing user experience workflows
Updated August 06, 2016
UXPin has my vote for being the best tool for wire framing user experience workflows
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with UXPin
One of our frequent mantra's is 'wireframe everything'. We found that UXPin is the best at meeting our needs for doing that. As part of our process, from the very beginning we wireframe as much of the site as possible and present clients a working link where they can click through to each page. This allows them to start to see how we think and let them know what we are missing. It's a much more real experience and it sets expectations on them for the content they need to provide us. With the use of UXPin's smart elements we can create layouts fast and correct based on clients modifications just as easily. As a designer it helps me take control of the conversation and address client concerns so that we know what content and assets are available to use before we start design. The wireframes also serve as a blueprint for our development department because they cover things like what form fields will be available and what areas clients will need to be able to edit content. Overall it creates a much more collaborative experience that encourages conversation before design decisions are made or code is written.
- 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!
- It would be nice if the link that I share with my clients is shorter. It's so long and unintelligible.
- Copy and paste doesn't always paste where you think it will. It would be a time saver if you copied a smart element from one page and then pasted it down at the same x and y coordinates on the next page.
- 'Cntrl' + 'Z' is good for one undo but try to undo more than a few and I'm not sure what is happening in the background. I had it undo some things that were out of my view on the page and I couldn't put them back without rebuilding the section.
- I don't like to show my clients the link with comment mode turned on because it causes confusion. I wish there was a way to turn it off for a set of wireframes so that I don't have to turn it off every time I am about to send the link.
- When you pull an image by a corner it is too easy to accidentally stretch and image. In my opinion is should default to keeping the image proportionate. People that don't know better will stretch things without knowing and there is not a way to reset to the actual size.
- We may be spending more time in creating wireframes but the return is a clear idea of what needs to be built and what we have to build it with.
- Because we start wireframes so early we also get the client working for us early as well. It has fundamentally changed this conversation from what is the site going to look like to what it the site going to do for me and what holes do we need to fill to make that happen.
- As client content and their business goals get addressed sooner, this allows us to focus on creating better user experiences.
- From a team perspective, it has allowed us to all be on the same page. If something is in question we can pull up the wireframe and have a much more meaningful conversation with a live link rather than dealing with a series of heavy weight files that may or may not be the latest version.
- Moqups, Balsamic and Axure
I went through several tools trying to find something that was easy to use and made me faster. Visio was such a pain at creating something reusable to make me faster, too much building. Axure and Balsamiq looked like great options but were too cumbersome for my needs and I couldn't get to the live link fast enough. Moqups was my first choice before I heard about UXPin. I switched to UXPin because the had more built in features, more icons and just an overall better and more usable interface that appealed to my design side.