10 Tools Product Designers Should Know

Product designers, who undertake the tasks of imagining, creating and iteratively developing products that solve the users’ problems or meet particular needs, can take advantage of the possibilities of digital applications to fulfil their significant responsibilities. As Digital Panorama, which supports brands at every stage, from idea to design, in this article, we have listed applications that make product designers’ lives easier.

Today, we use many digital products while shopping, having fun, meeting our financial needs and consuming content. Each product stands out with its own experiences, responding to a need of end users or solving a problem. These experiences are designed with the efforts of product designers. Product designers, who take responsibility for imagining, creating, and iteratively developing products that solve users’ problems or meet specific needs in a given market, overcome their challenges through digital applications designed by other product designers.

In digital product development processes that involve comprehensive and long steps such as identifying user needs, user testing, prototyping, implementation, testing and user behaviour analysis, tools that meet the needs are used. As Digital Panorama, in this article, we will include ten tools product designers should know, that facilitate product development processes. Before we examine the applications developed for different needs, let’s explore the phases of the product development process.

What is the product design process?

The product design process is a comprehensive process that takes its foundation from the design thinking approach and extends from defining the problem to testing the solution. According to Cam Sackett, the design thinking process consists of five basic steps.

1. Empathize with people.
2. Describe the problem.
3. Generate the solution.
4. Make a prototype.
5. Test the solution.

Considering that the needs, problems, and technologies behind the solution will change over time, it is necessary to accept that the product design process is a never-ending process. As the way technology and users interact with the product transforms, the product keeps up with this transformation.

When we evaluate these steps, we can see that product designers need products that let them interact with the consumer, create mind maps to define the problem and produce a solution, prototype and test this solution idea, and that they need to work as a team while doing all these. Today, digital tools can meet all the expectations of product designers. Let’s take a look at the tools that specifically respond to the needs of these stages.

10 Tools Product Designers Should Know

1. User testing and interview: UserZoom

UserZoom, which stands out as one of the applications used by technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and PayPal in their user experience research (UX research) processes, stands out as one of the most powerful tools that combine mixed research techniques, offers extensive reporting features and can be used in user tests. Product designers can conduct video-based conversations with users by using UserZoom. In addition, they have the opportunity to verify their designs and ideas and learn about user problems first-hand with applications such as click tests, card sorting, and tree tests.

2. Brainstorming: Miro

Product teams frequently use Miro as a collaborative tool that carries long hours of meetings in front of the whiteboard to the computer. A highly functional application for use cases such as mapping, diagramming, strategy and planning, Miro is useful for agile workflows; it can also be integrated with different tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, InVision and Notion.

3. Prototyping: Whimsical

Information architecture, one of the more important concepts that come to mind when the product design is mentioned, helps to explain the order of importance of the information to be used in the product and their relationship with each other by using flow charts, wireframes and mind maps. Whimsical facilitates communication between product designers and developer teams with prototyping possibilities for desktop, iPhone, Android, tablet or special devices. Whimsical, which serves to bring together and present ideas with flow maps, design templates with wireframes, and ideas with mind maps, offers an interface suitable for the rapid nature of the product development process.

4. Prototyping and production: Figma

Figma, which has become one of the indispensable tools for developer teams and product designers, and was purchased by Adobe for $ 20 billion in the past months, is known as one of the most popular “all-in-one” design tools on the market. Figma stands out with its comprehensive features that meet all the needs of teams developing digital products. With Figma, product designers can draw the screens of the product they designed, connect them, and create prototypes on Figma to show the in-product flows. In addition, Figma allows generating of ideas in collaboration with its product, FigJam. Product teams love Figma because it offers so many different design tools on one platform.

5. Delivery to the design and software team: Zeplin

Zeplin, the choice of brands such as HSBC, Pinterest, Autodesk, and Starbucks, is positioned as an important collaboration tool in the process of turning the completed interfaces in design applications such as Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch into flows and delivering them to the developers. Zeplin, which has an interface like Figma, offers a space where all product design teams can work together with its features for determining user flows, connecting API endpoints and sharing requirements.

6. No-code development: bubble.io

Bubble.io, which has attracted the most attention in web and mobile application development processes in recent years and offers non-technical users the opportunity to develop applications and websites with conventional methods such as drag-and-drop, is preferred by companies from different sectors such as Gartner, HubSpot, Zendesk and Lyft. Bubble allows building interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and web browsers, including all the features needed to create a site like Facebook and Airbnb. Its intuitive interface works not only on the front end but also on the back end, where logic and complex codes come into play, allowing the opportunity to develop applications without writing code.

7. Documentation: Notion

Notion is positioned as a collaborative work and documentation space for teams of all sizes. Considering that the product development process will include many written meeting outputs, documents where ideas come to mind, mission, vision notes and product roadmaps to keep the team on the same page, Notion ensures that these documents are never lost and are always accessible to all team members. It is a stylish and easy-to-use workflow/project management tool.

8. Task management: monday.com

Considering that productivity and efficiency are essential for success in the product development process, a task and project management tool that the whole team will actively use is indispensable. Monday.com centralizes all work, processes, tools and files in one working operating system. In this way, teams are connected, and all data on the product design process is collected in one place. Monday.com, which facilitates business tracking with visual boards, makes business management and product design fast and efficient with its different view possibilities and dashboards that offer a comprehensive view of business processes. In addition, Monday.com can integrate with tools such as Slack, Dropbox, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

9. Team communication: Slack

Slack, which started with the mission of replacing e-mail and was adopted in a short time, is a widely used professional messaging platform that allows teams to facilitate their communication and work together more efficiently. Allowing group chats and one-to-one conversations through channels, Slack also makes short calls possible with its voice call feature called Huddle. Slack also offers integration with more than 2,000 tools, such as Google Drive, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

10. Behavior analysis and temperature map: Hotjar

Hotjar is known for its heatmaps, feedback tools, session recording feature, and survey tools that help product designers understand how users experience their products. Thanks to Hotjar, product designers can discover what behavioural patterns users follow when using their products, how long they wait at which points, and which feature of the product they have difficulty solving directly through user experiences. These discoveries turn into insights that guide teams through product design and development.

Each digital tool enables designers, developers, user experience researchers, in short, all product teams to work efficiently with products they have developed for different needs and problems. Teams that have established a valid working culture can easily put this culture into practice by using the tools listed above. As Digital Panorama, which offers solutions from idea to experience by focusing on content and design, we regularly use some of the tools listed above to carry out effective work processes. While producing visual content for today’s and tomorrow’s multi-channel digital touchpoints, we focus on problems and develop qualified solutions for these problems with the power of computer-aided images and animation. If you want to discover what we can do for you as Digital Panorama, you can reach us at this link.