28 Best Product Design Tools For Designers To Build Great Products

Every designer has faced the challenge of getting their product design just right. With so many moving parts, getting lost in the weeds is easy. This is where product design tools come in. They can help you organize your product design process, gain clarity, and improve team collaboration. This article will review the best product design tools to help you create better products faster.  

NUMI is a product design tool that helps teams build effective product designs that meet user and business needs. Using NUMI, you can create a design that meets stakeholders’ requirements before moving on to visual design and prototyping.

What is Product Design?

Product design is developing a usable product that meets customers' needs by defining the users' problems and finding creative solutions for these problems. The term is also used to refer to the result of this process, the design qualities of an existing product. Product design is based on design thinking, an approach to solving problems creatively.

The Core Principles of Effective Product Design

We can define the following three characteristics to describe product design:

1. Product design is a complex process that includes various tasks, from research to prototyping and testing.
2. Product design is human-centered (as all good things are) but involves more consideration of the business’s needs and market situation.
   
3. Product design is never-ending (or almost so). You cannot say it is a clearly defined set of steps. Everyone follows the structure they consider the most suitable and efficient. Still, the process may include an unexpected number of iterations crucial for understanding the problem and finding the best solution.

In essence, product design encompasses both the process and the outcome. It is not merely about creating aesthetically pleasing objects but about crafting solutions that seamlessly integrate into: 

• Users' lives
• Enhance their experiences
• Ultimately add value

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• Digital Product Design

What Are Product Design Tools?

Product design tools help teams visualize, mock-up, and iterate products throughout the design process. Developers and professional web designers use these tools at various stages in their processes—whether they are: 

• Collecting user research
• Building customer journey maps
• Creating prototypes

Instead of managing your budget, tasks, team communications, and documents separately, solid product design software brings everything into one platform to help your team do better work faster. Not only does this design software make it possible to refine your ideas before development, but it also makes your job a lot easier. With the right tool, you’ll never need ever again to: 

• Dig for mockups
• Design briefs
• Spec sheets

Types of Product Design Tools 

To be successful, your product team needs to use a combination of tools that help them complete each stage of the design process efficiently and effectively. 

Here are some of the most important types of product design tools:

Customer Research and Feedback Tools

These tools empower you to collect both quantitative and qualitative data and refine your design process.  

Prototyping Tools

Product teams use these to create efficient low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. This allows for early-stage feedback from user testing, ensuring your design is on the right track before jumping into extensive development.  

Testing Tools

These tools help you identify bugs and usability issues in your product before it’s released to the public, ensuring you maintain quality standards throughout the design process.  

Team Collaboration Tools

From ideation to shipping, product teams must communicate regularly and keep tabs on the design project they’re working on. That’s what tools in this category help achieve.  

Why NUMI is the Ultimate Design Partner for Startups

NUMI is a Framer web design agency powered by world-class Framer developers and product designers. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all your needs for the design of your startups: 

• Sourcing
• Vetting
• Hiring

We have a fabulous design team that ensures all of your design work is being done well. NUMI helps with: 

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs! 

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more! 

8 Product Design Tools For Research & Ideation

1. Whimsical: The Mind Mapping Tool for Organizing Ideas

Whimsical combines documents and whiteboards in the same online collaboration hub, making it easy for designers to move seamlessly between brainstorming and mapping out design concepts. This saves time and streamlines the overall design process. 

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Mind maps: Start with a mind-mapping tool to organize ideas and concepts effortlessly. 
• Flowcharts: Visualize data with easy and convenient diagrams. 
• Wireframes: Create beautiful low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes in minutes. 
• Documentation & collaboration: Simultaneously, work on a single document and exchange ideas in real-time.

A whimsical rich library of configurable elements makes it easy to create sophisticated prototypes, speeding up the design and development process because of:

• Buttons
• Inputs
• Checkboxes and more

What is the price? 

• Pro plan: $12 per editor/month ($10 per editor if billed annually). 
• Organization plan: $20 per editor/month

2. UserBit: Your UX Research & Design Stack

UserBit provides UX researchers and designers with an entire UX design stack. This fantastic product designer software allows teams of all sizes to keep all the research data they need within one platform and collaborate in real-time on: 

• Personas
• Journey maps
• User research
• Card sorting
• Visual sitemaps, and more. 

How can this tool benefit you? UX research. At this stage, it is a valuable tool for: 

• Preparing and recording interviews
• Generating automatic transcriptions from video and audio recordings
• Analyzing survey data
• Managing participants and stakeholders

Streamlining User-Centered Design with Research and Analysis Tools

• Analysis: Manage all your research data and insights within an analytics dashboard. 
• Information architecture: Create user personas, conduct card sorting studies, and finally, get the architecture of your product right with visual sitemaps. 
• Interaction design: Using user flows, map out your users’ paths and build customer journey maps in one place. 

What is the price? 

• Free plan: one project and limited features 
• Pro plan (3 users minimum): $20/user/month 
• Enterprise plan: $30/user/month (annual billing only)

3. Miro: The Visual Collaboration Tool

Miro is a web-based collaborative tool that helps teams ideate and manage digital whiteboards. Miro is especially useful for Agile workflows because it has a variety of use cases: 

• Strategy
• Planning
• Mapping
• Diagramming

Miro provides teams with templates specifically designed to help them work collaboratively. 

• Image source/templates: How can this tool benefit you? 
• Tools integration. It gives teams a priceless possibility to connect, automate manual processes and make work more efficient. Miro integrates with over 100 product management, design, and documentation apps, like: some text
  • Figma, 
  • InVision
  • Microsoft Teams
• Template library. Miro has template categories organized by use cases like customer journey mapping or brainstorming, so you can easily find the perfect template for your current project. 

What is the price? 

• Team plan: $10/member/month
• Business plan: $20/member/month 
• Enterprise plan: custom pricing

4. Smaply: The Tool for Customer Journey Maps

Smaply, a platform to manage your customer experience, allows you to create, share and present your: 

• Customer journey maps
• Personas 
• Stakeholder maps

It’s great for supporting a design thinking workshop, particularly for those following the framework to the letter. Smaply also provides a beautiful and detailed persona and stakeholder editor that can ensure the defined stage of your design project. Design thinking tools that allow for the live co-creation of a design document can greatly boost your ongoing design efforts.

5. EnjoyHQ: All-in-One Customer Research

Part of UserTesting’s suite of research and analysis tools, EnjoyHQ is a platform for centralizing, organizing, and sharing customer research in one place. The insights you can gain from such curation can be invaluable in defining your customer stories and personas. Being able to cross-reference customer feedback, interview data, and other data sources can also help you make sense of things quickly. 

For best results, integrate insights from your customer support and design teams on an ongoing basis. Being able to review insights from previous periods can really help inform your process and save time on potentially unnecessary user interviews.

6. Userforge: Create Personas Efficiently

Some of the best design thinking tools are really good at a specific job. Userforge promises to help you create in-depth and realistic personas with fewer clicks than most design software. You’ll find templates and images to help speed up your process and make persona creation easier. 

We love that Userforge is easy to use and that anyone can create usable personas without design skills. It’s a great tool to bring to a design sprint where you might invite people from your sales, dev or support teams and want to involve them throughout the process.

7. MakeMyPersona: Hubspot’s Free Persona Generator

MakeMyPersona by Hubspot is a slick solution that can help you structure the information you have about your customer personas. It guides you through 19 essential questions that cover the most important aspects of building your personas. Your answers and the output personas can be downloaded in Word format via email. It’s a simple tool for beginners to start thinking about personas and involve non-design team members. 

MakeMyPersona is a great free design thinking tool I’d recommend to those wanting to learn (or teach) persona creation.

8. Stormboard: Digital Whiteboards for Brainstorming

When running brainstorming sessions online, Stormboard is a digital whiteboard tool that stands out with functionality designed to support a facilitation process. You’ll find features to help generate ideas, organize them and then sort them by priority. 

Stormboard is an excellent addition to your design thinking toolkit, particularly for facilitated processes. It provides a little more structure and guidance than more freeform online whiteboards, which can help ensure a productive process.

15 Product Design Tools For Design, Prototyping & Testing

1. NUMI: Your Go-To Resource for Design Work

NUMI is a framer web design agency with world class developers and product designers power. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing / vetting / hiring needs for design. We have a fabulous design team that ensures that all of your design work is being done well. 

NUMI helps all of your startup's design needs with: 

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers who are ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more!

2. Figma: The All-in-One Design Tool

If you think Figma is just another product designer tool, think again. As an all-in-one tool that offers endless design features, the ability to track changes, and the ability to share your work in real time with stakeholders and clients, it’s truly a game-changer for teams, large or small. Figma makes creating prototypes easy. Anyone can create a mockup, share it with others, and gather feedback all in one place. 

How can this tool benefit you? Unique set of tools and features. Figma has tools you won’t find in other programs, like a pen tool that allows you to change the width of lines on the fly and OpenType features to help make your design ideas come to life. 

Enhancing Collaboration and Efficiency with Figma's Powerful Features

• Seamless prototyping. Create animated, interactive prototypes in a snap—no coding required. Send a link to your team so everyone can work together more efficiently. 
• Plugins and widgets. Automate tasks and customize your workflow with plugins created by the Figma community. 
• Simplified developer handoff. Developers can review the code in your design files directly within Figma without additional effort. Simply select the frame or object, and the code appears right before their eyes. 
• Organize your files. Figma enables teams to manage their files in a way that helps them collaborate. 

Unlocking Creativity and Collaboration with Figma and FigJam

With Figma, your team can create multiple pages per file and easily navigate between pages. Figma has developed an online whiteboarding tool called FigJam, which is free for anyone to use. FigJam is one of the best online product design tools for product design and prototyping. 

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Ideation and brainstorming. Sketch your ideas and get feedback with sticky notes, dot voting, stamps, or emotes, all in real time. 
• Diagrams. Map your processes and systems with intuitive, easy-to-use shapes and arrows. 

What is the price? 

• Figma Professional: $15/user/month 
• Figma Organization: $45/user/month (yearly billing only)

3. Sketch: Intuitive Design for Prototyping

Sketch is a very intuitive and flexible software to design products with a highly active community of designers and developers. It’s the perfect balance between an intuitive interface and powerful tools that let teams design and collaborate from the start of the project until its completion. 

Sketch is currently only compatible with macOS and has no plans to launch for Windows or iOS anytime soon. Sketch can be used to collaboratively create and refine every aspect of your design process, from brainstorming to product launch. Image source 

Simplifying Product Design and Collaboration with Sketch

How can this tool benefit you? 

• All-in-one toolkit. Sketch helps you through every stage of your product design process, from brainstorming and collaboration to the final touches on your product design. 
• Prototype testing. Turn your designs into prototypes and test them out on your browser, Mac app, or device. 
• Collaboration in real-time. Work with your team, share feedback and hand off tasks in one place. 
• Accessible for everyone. Anyone can use Sketch. Its features are so intuitive that even non-designers can start using it in minutes. This means designers can test ready-to-launch designs with users or stakeholders more efficiently than ever. 

What is the price? 

• Standard plan for individuals and teams: $9 per editor, monthly or $99 per editor, yearly 
• Business plan for organizations: custom pricing (25 editors minimum)

4. Adobe XD: The All-in-One UX & UI Software

Adobe XD is the all-in-one UX and UI software to: 

• Design products and prototype websites
• Web apps
• Mobile apps
• Hardware

Fast, powerful, and everything you need for the entire product design process from: 

• Low-fidelity wireframes
• Hi-fi interactive prototypes

Adobe XD is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and combines the strengths of many tools into a single integrated experience. With it, teams can design and prototype products quickly and efficiently. 

Transforming Design with Adobe XD’s Advanced Features

How can this tool benefit you? 

Vector-based editor tool with unlimited artboards and smart guides help you align different design objects and elements. 

• Components and states. Components make it easy to implement changes across entire designs or documents, so you don’t have to duplicate and make those changes manually. 
• Rich set of animation features. Animate your content with motion and micro-animations, or play videos and Lottie files. 
• 3D Transforms. Make your designs come to life with the illusion of depth and perspective. 

What is the price? 

• Single Adobe XD app plan: $11,99/month 
• All apps plan (20+ Creative Cloud apps, including XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects): $35,99/month

5. InVision: A Design Collaboration Tool

InVision empowers you to collaborate at every stage of the product design process so that your team is constantly working together in one place and never duplicating effort. It contains all the tools and assets you need to: 

• Create
• Wireframe
• Prototype
• Animate stunning visuals

InVision gives everyone a shared space for reviewing design mockups and prototypes, discussing ideas, and aligning on next steps—all within one place. 

Boosting Creativity and Productivity with Versatile Design Tools

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Ready-to-connect integrations: Your digital whiteboard can be embedded with all of your favorite tools, such as Figma, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Kanban boards, and more. 
• Adaptive layout for responsive design: You can adjust your designs to fit any screen size without redoing the work. 
• Rapid prototyping: Allows easy implementation of fluid interactions, mobile device mirroring, and instant playback. 
• Built-in animation: Smart-swipe transitions, timeline editing, and auto-layer linking are now available. 
• Components: Component libraries with global syncing and real-time updates help you ensure design consistency. 
• Templates: Various template options based on categories and roles helps you to focus on the essential tasks. 

What is the price? 

• Plan for individuals: free 
• Pro plan (up to 200 users): $4/user/month billed annually or $4,95 billed monthly

6. Overflow: Visually Documenting User Flows

Overflow is one of the best product design tools for getting your ideas out there quickly. It helps you visually document your ideas and concepts, draw beautiful user flow diagrams, and create stunning design presentations that tell a story in a snap. 

Enhancing Design Workflows and Communication with Overflow

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Build interactive user flows. Overflow makes building user flow diagrams effortlessly and swiftly, speeding up the workflow by making it faster to generate diagrams. 
• Meaningful design presentations. With Overflow, you can create professional design presentations to engage your audience. To make your presentation seamless, you can use only the screens you want to share, group and organize them efficiently, and add additional content or branding elements. 
• Communicate effortlessly. Discussing your work and collaborating with the team becomes much easier when using this software for product design. It allows one to share ideas and get feedback without registering or learning a complicated design program. 

What is the price? 

• Pro plan: $15/user/month or $12/user/month if billed yearly 
• Enterprise plan: custom pricing

7. Balsamiq: Wireframing for Prototyping

Balsamiq is a product design software for low-fidelity wireframing that provides quick and flexible prototypes and decreases the time and cost of designing. With Balsamiq’s combination of sketching and collaboration features, you can focus on what matters most: the content and structure of your design. Its simple interface and drag-and-drop simplicity allow it to create powerful mockups in minutes. 

Speeding Up Design with Interactive Prototypes and Pre-Made Components

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Interactive prototypes. Create simple prototypes to demonstrate your ideas or test usability. 
• Built-in UI components. Hundreds of pre-made and user-generated UI controls and icons allow designers to create dozens of wireframes quickly without wasting time on creating the components themselves. 

What is the price? 

• 2 projects: $9/month or $90/year 
• 20 projects: $49/month or $490/year 
• 200 projects: $199/month or $1,990/year

8. Framer: A Tool for Interactive Prototyping

Framer is a design tool for creating prototypes rather than a post-development tool. It’s great product designer software if you’re already on top of the newest web design innovations and want to create interactive prototypes with various features. Framer’s easy-to-learn interface makes it easy for designers to start prototyping in minutes. Framer is the perfect tool for teams looking to create prototypes with a variety of features and capabilities 

Streamlining Web Design with Framer's Templates and Plugins

How can this tool benefit you? 

• Dozens of professionally designed templates. Framer makes it easy for you to create websites with dozens of customizable templates and ready-to-use elements—then publish them straight away. 
• Plugins. Framer’s store offers a variety of plugins that give designers features such as UI kits for integrating social media channels, players for embedding a variety of media, grids, and other valuable components. 

What is the price? 

One site with limited features: 

• Free Basic site: $12/month 
• Pro site: $16/month 
• Framer also charges editors who collaborate on paid sites $14/month per editor.

9. Boords: Your Storyboarding Toolbox

Boords aims to be your complete storyboard toolbox. While much of its toolkit focuses on creating storyboards for video, it can also effectively be used to create customer journey prototypes and animations. Their storyboard creator allows you to experiment with pictures and gifs, voiceover and action text, or redraw existing frames. 

With the animation tool, you can make animations from your frames with sounds to create prototypes you might show to your users for feedback. 

10. Proto.io: Build Prototypes No Coding Required

Creating working prototypes that users can explore on their own is a must for certain projects. While developers can create a working prototype for testing in the form of a hackathon, sometimes, you’ll need a fast, no-code solution that you can use to validate a prototype without involving your dev team. 

Proto.io is a modern design thinking tool for prototype testing that makes it easy to build beautiful prototypes quickly. It offers simple but effective building tools and interaction types, as well as a content library and features to help you share your projects with testers.

11. UserTesting: Get Feedback from Real Users

UserTesting is one of the best and biggest names in user testing applications. Pick users according to what you want to test whether it’s a website or mobile app. The platform records every move your testers make, so you can truly understand how they navigate and perform the tasks you assign to them. 

Over the years, UserTesting has become a fully featured suite that allows you to analyze the data collected and amplify the insights throughout your organization. If you’re looking to scale your design thinking capabilities and become a more research-oriented company, UserTesting is a powerful option.

12. Pingpong: A User-Research Platform

Pingpong is a user-research platform where you can find tens of thousands of testers worldwide. Pingpong will automatically set up the best testers for you based on your needs and you can easily schedule interviews which can be recorded as video feedback and later analyzed. 

Compared to some other user research platforms, Pingpong has a cohort that is great for usability testing and ironing out product prototypes.

13. Maze: Test Your Prototypes with Users

Maze is a user research and testing platform that we’ve found to be a great choice for creating interactive prototypes you want to test with users. With Maze, it’s easy to create wireframes and prototypes, share them with users, and receive actionable insights as a result. 

In our experience, the heatmaps and analytics resulting from your tests in Maze can provide incredible insights for your design team to follow up on. It’s a great way to validate ideas and get a sense of how a proposed change feels.

14. VWO: A/B Testing for Websites  

At its heart, VWO is a digital optimization platform focusing on A/B testing web-based experiences. If you’re testing different solutions on your website or web-based apps, VWO makes it easy to: 

• Create
• Run
• Optimize experiments and test at speed. 

After it’s been implemented, it’s possible to run tests based on user feedback without needing to fiddle with server-side code. For anyone looking for online tools to replace the now defunct Google Optimize, VWO is a great tool that can help you find the best solution from various experiments and tests. It also has an analytics suite featuring heatmaps and funnel analyses!

15. Userpilot – Best for Code Free Design Process

The Userpilot platform helps you identify the right user personas and has features that enable you to perform effective product testing. 

Key features: 

• Design UI patterns: With access to UI patterns like tooltips, modals, banners, sidebars, and checklists, you have creative freedom for your design needs, whether triggering a quick in-app message or driving adoption for new feature releases. 
• A/B testing: You can compare two or more in-app flows and experiences to gain insights into what works best for your audience. 
• Feature tagging: Use feature tagging to understand how users interact with your tool and make better product development decisions.

Related Reading

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• Product Design Prototype
• MVP Development Cost
• Product Designer vs UX Designer

5 Product Design Tools For Management & Collaboration

1. Asana: A Top Tool for Product Design Management and Collaboration 

Asana is a great tool for helping creative teams: 

• Organize
• Track
• Manage their work

It makes it simple to plan workflows and projects, and you can set deadlines to help keep your team on schedule at every step – from start to finish.

Key features: 

• Plan and structure your design projects in a way that works for you 
• Assign tasks and set priorities and deadlines 
• Follow your projects and tasks to completion 

2. Typeform: The Best Product Design Survey Tool 

Typeform specializes in online form building and online surveys. Whether you’re running a survey to get data for an infographic or to get feedback on your designs from your teammates, the platform makes it simple to create user-friendly forms that generate valuable responses.

Key features: 

• Create forms, surveys, quizzes, and polls 
• Incorporate different types of media to bring questions to life and get the most valuable

feedback possible 

• Integrate with key platforms to collect and collate data 

3. Notion: A Creative Wiki for Product Design 

In the initial stages of the collaborative design process, it might be handy to save screenshots or links to websites that you and your team find inspiring. Notion is a Wiki-style tool that can be used in a host of ways, but it works particularly well for gathering references collaboratively. 

Store and organize them in different pages so you and your team can refer back to them throughout the process.

Key features: 

• Customize it to suit your workflow 
• Choose from thousands of free templates 
• Integrate with dozens of other tools 

4. Monday: A Go To for Agile Product Design Teams 

Monday is effective for teams that practice Scrum, a project management approach that focuses on iterative development and adaptability through fixed-length sprints or time boxes (which typically last 2-4 weeks) rather than continuous work. 

The platform was originally designed for Scrum, but has gained enough popularity over the years that it’s used for just about any PM approach, including Kanban. 

5. Loom: Improve Your Feedback Process with Video 

Have you ever tried to explain an issue via email, then got to the fourth sentence and erased everything because it didn’t make sense? Loom is a great screen recording tool that allows you to record sound and capture your face. It sounds so basic, but it is shocking the difference it can make in helping someone understand your thoughts.

It is like the equivalent of a “quick question” in the office and the best part is that it doesn’t take any space on your local drive. Just a simple cloud link.

Subscribe To A Guild of World Class Framer Developers with Our Framer Web Design Agency Today

NUMI is a world-class framer web design agency powered by world-class framer developers and product designers. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing / vetting / hiring needs for design. We have a fabulous design team that ensures that all of your design work is being done well. 

NUMI helps with: 

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs! 

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers who are ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more!

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