What makes users come back to your product? And how do you design a product interface with all the right technical specs, attractive UI, and the user needs at heart?
Here, you’ll find the 10 best UI design tools worth trying.
We’ve outlined all the key features, applications, and prices to help you compare different interface design software and choose the one that best suits your needs.
In this article
What is UI and UX?
User interface (UI) design creates the interactive visual experience of a digital product. This includes buttons, menus, icons, color palettes, and other visual elements contributing to a positive and intuitive user experience (UX).
User experience (UX) is a broader concept that ensures users can use the digital product without a second thought, efficiently, and in a way that fulfills all their needs.
Successful UI and UX design is accomplished by understanding the target user needs and behavior using appropriate interface design software.
Types of Interface Design Software Tools
Flexy designers have years of experience testing and using different interface design software to create digital product designs for clients around the globe. We know the importance of selecting the right software, which starts with the type of interface design software required.
Here are the different interface design software categories:
- User flow mapping tools
- Wireframing tools
- Prototyping tools
- UI design tools
- And handoff tools
The 11 Best Interface Design Software For Better Product Design
- Figma
Figma is a top-rated, most collaborative interface design software that can be used for a range of design needs. This tool is browser-based but there is a downloadable application that can be used to create moodboards, wireframes, roadmaps, mockups, and branding designs.
Figma also has a sister app called FigJam, made for brainstorming and pooling ideas.
Key features:
- Easy copy-paste integration between Figma and FigJam.
- Simple design-to-development handoff.
- Figma is integrated with popular design tools like Adobe Photoshop and Sketch.
- An auto-layout for a responsive design.
- Embedded commenting, cursor-follow, and voice-call functions that help teams collaborate.
- A new AI feature auto-generates boards and diagrams in FigJam.
- A drag-and-drop interface.
- Easy export in a range of formats.
2. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, a great prototyping tool for designing mobile apps and websites. This interface design software is powerful and can be used for ideation, wireframing, prototyping, and impressive animations.
Key features:
- A vector-based drag-and-drop editor tool and smart guides that help you align different objects.
- Ready-made components for Apple Design, Google Material Design, Amazon Alexa, and others.
- An auto-animate feature that turns your prototypes into functioning designs with micro-interactions.
- Projects can be saved in the cloud.
- 3D Transforms lets you simulate object depth in your designs.
- Voice prototyping.
3. CorelDRAW
CorelDraw is a powerful vector graphics editor that is perfect for designing illustrations, logos, sites, and even merchandise. With over 100 million users, this interface design software offers a wide range of tools that are easy to learn and use, affordable one-time purchase (considering how much a subscription software would cost in the long run), and versatile.
Key features:
- An all-inclusive set of drawing tools including Bézier curves, spiro curves, and polylines.
- Photo editing and retouch tools.
- Special effects with enhanced previews, nodes, and handles.
- A text editor with many formatting options.
- A wide range of templates and objects.
- Supports multiple file formats.
4. Webflow
Webflow is the perfect interface design software if you do not know HTML or CSS. Instead of designing a prototype, you can use a template with an easy drag-and-drop function that does not limit your creativity.
Key features:
- There is a range of templates to choose from and a flexible layout system.
- Webflow can be integrated with other products like email marketing platforms or social media platforms.
- You can easily add hover, scroll, and classic animations.
- Custom code can be added.
- A custom domain can be chosen to personalize your website.
- You can make your design responsive and mobile adaptive.
5. Zeplin
Zeplin is a design delivery software that takes care of the whole process, although it is not a design tool at heart. All you need to do is publish your finished designs and select the platform you’re designing for (e.g. web, iOS, Android).
Zeplin is useful for displaying product requirements, user flows, and design behavior so that developers don’t overlook use cases or conditional paths.
Key features:
- Collaboration tools such as annotations, real-time updates, and commenting.
- Styleguide creation.
- Interactive specifications that allow developers to inspect individual layers and extract code snippets.
6. Framer
Framer, formerly called Framer X, is a great interface design software for creating high-fidelity prototypes. While it has a 20+K community, this interface design platform has a somewhat high learning curve, which requires basic CSS and HTML knowledge.
Key features:
- A template structure with UI kits for landing pages, app designs, and project management.
- A direct Figma plugin to easily transfer ready designs.
- Sticky scroll navigation bars that stay visible while users scroll down the page.
7. Sketch
Sketch is a vector graphic interface design software that is perfect for beginner and advanced designers planning to create wireframes, prototypes, illustrations, and complete design handoff. Another benefit is that Sketch is flexible and designers can save time by making universal changes through layer, symbol, or font libraries.
Key features:
- Vector editing tools and editable boolean operations.
- Customizable grids, design presents, and flexible artboards.
- Variable and Open Type fonts.
- Cross-platform tools that enable real-time feedback, sharing, and developer handoff.
8. InVision
InVision is a full-suite, cloud-based interface design software that lets you outline the user journey, collaborate on early wireframes, and design high-fidelity prototypes. The collaboration features make it easy for developers to share their work, receive feedback, and document changes.
Another useful feature is the digital whiteboard where teams can brainstorm.
Key features:
- A vector-drawing tool.
- Adaptive layout that allows you to adjust and scale your designs.
- Built-in animation, which includes smart-swipe transitions, timeline editing, and auto-layer linking.
- Shared component libraries.
- An “Inspect” tool for generating specs for developers to use.
- Integration with Sketch, Photoshop, JIRA, and Storybook.
9. Marvel
With Marvel, you can design wireframes, mockups, and prototypes straight from your browser. This interface design software offers hundreds of wireframe templates that can be picked to suit specific device types (e.g. Android, iOS, PC).
Its unique feature is that you can turn wireframes into interactive prototypes in just a few minutes without using code.
Key features:
- Handoff feature that gives developers all the HTML code and CSS styles.
- Drag-and-drop wireframe templates.
- A big collection of pre-made assets, images, and icons.
- Built-in user testing function.
- Integration for JIRA, Maze, Confluence.
10. Lucidchart
Lucidchar has over 13 million users, a popular interface design software among designers for its versatility. This platform is cloud-based and is useful for making diagrams, user flows, wireframes, and journey maps.
Lucidchart is also quite intuitive and easy for designers to create and edit diagrams without a steep learning curve.
Key features:
- Quick diagramming features that save time.
- Real-time collaboration with an in-editor chat, co-authoring, and collaborative cursors.
- Data visualization through data linking to overlay important metrics on existing diagrams which can be useful when designing interfaces for e-commerce sites.
- Integration with Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, Asana, and Slack.
11. Mockplus
Mockplus is a fast and collaborative prototyping tool that is perfect for designing interactive interface designs using UI libraries and templates. No wonder it is used by more than 2 million users! With Mockplus, you design web and mobile prototypes with zero coding.
Key features:
- Drag-and-drop structure that creates lifelike interactions.
- Automated design specs for developers to use.
- Over 3000 vector icons and pre-set components.
- Easy design import from Axure and Sketch.
- Quick export to HTML or PDF.
Will AI Replace Digital Product Interface Designers?
This is an interesting and relevant topic, which we will likely discuss in the future. The short answer is, no, AI cannot fully replace UI/UX designers.
Our take on the use of AI in interface design is that it will and already does make certain processes easier, there are new tools introduced to interface design software that improve workflows and cut the time to handoff.
Ultimately, AI can help UI/UX designers analyze large volumes of user data to choose the right design direction. Designers will be able to introduce more precise personalization options in the design. And certain aspects of the design process might be automated to assist the designer but it is very unlikely that AI can handle one of the most human-centric jobs out there.
You can clearly see the importance of a human-first approach in our detailed breakdown of interface design examples.
