UXPin is the best design tool
August 03, 2020
UXPin is the best design tool
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with UXPin
I brought UXPin into with me when I joined Fidelity Investments’ Innovation Lab as a Director of UX and Start-up Design Lead. This tool was used to produce hi-fidelity functional prototypes from concept to test to development to maintain design consistency for development. A side benefit allowed for a deeper understanding and working working process for both the front and back end development teams along with the UX and design teams who were a mix of co-located and distributed people. Our engineers could lean in and help designers with expression logic to help make concepts better with personalized experiences.
This tool offers something that most don’t. The interactions are real—not simulated—and previews of your work are presented HTML code, not converted to images. It’s a design tool that is technical enough for technologists to lean into, but powerfully enough that you don’t need it to produce the best prototypes engineers really got into it and created a lot of cross-team collaboration.
This tool offers something that most don’t. The interactions are real—not simulated—and previews of your work are presented HTML code, not converted to images. It’s a design tool that is technical enough for technologists to lean into, but powerfully enough that you don’t need it to produce the best prototypes engineers really got into it and created a lot of cross-team collaboration.
- Collaboration with teammates.
- Rapid prototyping.
- Design Systems.
- JSON File for content importing.
- Bulk editing via library components.
- Interactions, and micro UX.
- Sharing and requesting feedback.
- Version branching.
- Spec mode for developers (access to assets).
- Automatically produced visual style guide with fonts, colors, and imported assets.
- Imports from sketch while keeping the shapes, colors, and fonts fully editable.
- Boolean Pen (bezzier pen) for vector drawing, and pathfinder.
- Annotation capability via documentation mode.
- Password protect prototypes.
- Upload custom fonts (enterprise, or Pro version is key imho).
- 1,000s of built in icons (iOS, Android, Font Awesome etc).
- Prebuilt design component libraries (Material Design, Booptstrap, iOS).
- Video tutorials in-app.
- Moderate learning curve - UI is familiar, and customizable.
- Copy/paste interactions, and element properties.
- Canvas properties (grids, adaptive screen sizes, scrolling).
- Asynchronous Spell check.
- UXPin's customer support is top tier.
- 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.
- Quicker team alignment - a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.
- Quicker results from testing - fail faster.
- More accurate development output.
- Builds understanding of what is needed amongst team success (what designers need vs what developers need).
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 very familiar workspace. You can add logic to interactions and CSS to any of out of the box shapes or page elements.
I ended up choosing UXPin because you can create interactive components rather than having to have a screen to screen based interaction. This means no more creating multiple versions of a screen to show variations, i.e. dropdown selections.
With tools like Figma, and InVision - which are both great tools - you have to create a screen to account for every instance you want to account for and becomes very laborious in my professional opinion.
It’s the first web-based tool that outputs code rendered in the browser from a design created in a very familiar workspace. You can add logic to interactions and CSS to any of out of the box shapes or page elements.
I ended up choosing UXPin because you can create interactive components rather than having to have a screen to screen based interaction. This means no more creating multiple versions of a screen to show variations, i.e. dropdown selections.
With tools like Figma, and InVision - which are both great tools - you have to create a screen to account for every instance you want to account for and becomes very laborious in my professional opinion.
Do you think UXPin delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with UXPin's feature set?
Yes
Did UXPin live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of UXPin go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy UXPin again?
Yes