To win any battle, just having a good idea and strategy is not enough. A set of powerful tools with proven effectiveness is also necessary. Similarly, the app market is also like a war field with cutthroat competition. Let’s discuss a list of app design tools tailor-made for building an app that will increase the chances of the best delivery.
Prerequisites are needed before selecting the app design tools.
- Extensive market research: The app market is very competitive. The two most important app stores that are ruling the roost are Apple and Google. There are additional stores such as Samsung Galaxy, Huawei, Sony, Amazon, and so on selling custom-made apps to cater to the user's specific needs. When you do extensive market research, many questions like competitors, unique selling points, strengths and weaknesses, customer complaints on similar apps will be answered, which gives you a decisive advantage in developing your app.
- Purpose and target audience: Before you begin designing an app, a clear purpose has to be associated with the app to reach the target audience. For example, a banking app will help users to make transactions that are different from the services given by their respective banks. Identifying the target audience is very important as this will help you decide the UI design, the complexity, pricing, features, etc.
- Suitability for app stores: The app designers should make apps installed on various mobile phone platforms. It should work efficiently in both android and ios. Such apps will have high value in the market.
Best app design tools available in the digital market
App design is a meticulous process and, in each process, different tools are used in completing the task. The processes and the best app design tools used are given below.
- Wireframe: It is a blueprint that helps the developer in the early stages of how the app will be used by the user. It is two-dimensional. It is one of the most essential steps in building an app. These wireframes include page elements, categories of objects, navigation areas, and possible actions. The best wireframing tool available in the market are,
- Adobe XD: It is a complete design tool for wireframing. It is suitable for macOS, Windows, Android, ioS. It has a “repeat grid” option for fast designing. Also supports Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
- Sketch: It is a wireframe tool available only for Mac. It has a strong focus on UI. It is very easy to use. It has a lot of third-party UI kits to work with.
- Prototype: It is a process of understanding the look and feel of an app which will help the designer to understand the customer's reaction towards the design. It is a paramount tool for UI and UX developers. It is the next version of the wireframe.
The best app design tools for prototyping are
- Figma: It is a multipurpose tool, easy to use in creating a prototype with the latest features. It has additional features like Figmotion for animations and Autoflows for showing user paths.
- Axure RP: It is a prototyping tool ideal for professional UX designers. It offers a detailed documentation tool for better organization. It allows developers to publish their prototype on its cloud with all the codes.
- InVision Studio: It is a popular prototype tool with many features. It has a very useful vector drawing tool, great visual effects, and repeatable components. It helps design team members to work with great coordination throughout the project.
- App Testing: It is essential to test the app after the prototyping to make sure all features are working as per design requirements. The testing tool should support multiple scripting languages, show accurate results across different mobile platforms, help testers without coding knowledge, etc.
- TestComplete: It is an automated UI testing tool. It allows testing to be done for both native and hybrid mobile apps. It can run tests on virtual machines and emulators successfully. It allows a script and scriptless option for test generation.
- Appium: It’s an open-source UI testing tool. It is apt for mobile, native, and hybrid applications. It is similar to Selenium, supporting cross-platform testing and reuse of codes. It also supports multiple coding languages.
- Espresso: It is a popular mobile testing framework created by Google. It is integrated into Android studio. It is strictly used only for android apps.
The best app design tools combined with great team effort will you build an app that will rule.