The 2020 Product Designer Toolkit

Responsible for the entire product design chain:  consumer product strategy, research, performance, prototyping and development, the “product designer”, must be proactive in terms of improving the product.
To do this, several practical tools allow him to be more efficient on a daily basis in the industrialization of the design of his product..


The essentials for product monitoring
Endowed with the soul of a maker-entrepreneur, the product designer has flair!
He quickly identifies product opportunities and analyzes the performance of production chains for new products.


For his research he goes through gold mines of information dedicated to product design:

Product design tips
The Chrome extension, productdesign.tips
Productivity and project management applications
Demanding in product design, the product designer is also and above all, demanding in the management of the development team. Applications make it possible to industrialize the management of teamwork and to optimize the rendering of design workshops:

  • Notion : the collaborative workspace all-in-one for note taking, project management and task management. You can also make your design system interactive by putting it online without code!
  • Asana : no more emails! Manage your tasks with your team on a platform with clean and colorful graphics 
  • Miro : for the simultaneous sharing of these restitutions of UX workshops
  • Bear : for fans of to-do list synchronization 
  • Slack : the unbeatable solution for multi-device team conversations
  • JIRA : Are you in AGILE mode in managing your project? Jira is for you!
  • Atom : the development editor created by Github, it is adored by developers and dethrones Brackets and Sublime Text!

The versioning tool adored by UX and UI designers: 

  • Abstract

Add-ons and essential design software
The product designer's mission is to ensure that the design team is in optimal conditions to produce quality design
Add-ons and applications offer productivity gains.
Du versioning design tools that facilitate v
Value of interfaces, it is now possible to save time by not losing one's creative sense!

Undraw: the free library of illustrations useful for your simulations
 
Libraries of illustrations and iconographies to customize for a quality interface design
The 2020 UI trend is getting stronger in illustration and micro-interaction.
Open-source sites allow the customization of illustrations and icons to save time in the UI design of its Minimum Viable Product.

  • Humans : library of decomposed illustrations to mix and customize
  • Undraw : online library of illustrations customizable by color 
  • mixkit : the “Art” section offers free quality high-fidelity illustrations and graphic works
  • Guacamole : 20 original illustrations for the modest sum of 24 euros
  • nounproject : the reference library of free and practical iconographies for customizing icons
  • Orion : free library of worked iconographies

Applications to quickly generate a landing page with integrated campaign
Within a Lean-startup approach, it is sometimes recommended to go directly through landing page creation tools, called “builder”, on which we can play with the blocks of the proposed site models.

  • Nations : the simple and powerful landing page builder adored by start-ups. Attention, although the result is qualitative, the choice of illustrations is limited.
  • kickofflabs : a library of various landing page templates paired with campaign formats. 
  • Google websites : creating your landing via the Google builder is also possible and free.
  • Webflow : launching your landing page without code is also available on webflow. Be careful, getting started takes longer than a classic builder for beginners!
  • mobirise : the alternative to WordPress. Computer application that offers free extensions. Blocks are based on Bootstrap builder.

Useful tools for user testing
Your landing page is ready. Now it's time for the test!
Competitively priced tools can support you in your test phase.

 

Hotjar
Example of Heatmap with Hotjar
 

  • look-back : screen and tester recording for beautiful user test reports! 
  • Hotjar : nothing better than the analysis of hit maps to study with precision the paths and behavior of the testers!
  • Bugsee : ideal debugger for developers free via the installation of a free chrome extension which simultaneously delivers quantitative reporting. Synchronizable with Jira and Slack.
  • fullstory : customer experience analysis application that offers several features that can be integrated into Slack, Trello and Jira : analysis of interaction data from a website or web application to optimize conversion, collaborative space, recording.

For beautiful restitutions of ideation workshops
Open-source UX tools help in your restitution of ideation workshops: personas sheets, tree structure or user journeys. Getting started with these tools is intuitive and easy to export in various formats (pdf, svg, png).

  • Flow map : beautiful presentations of site maps, user journeys and visual personas for better productivity in the ideation phase.
  • whimsical :: it's open-source and the handling is intuitive!
  • Glide : beautiful slide templates  

Powerful influencer marketing, SEO and growth hacking services
Have you tested your landing page and want to refine your SEO performance and possibly develop Growth Hacking techniques to increase your leads on your page? 

  • Zapier : to connect web applications and automate workflows 
  • neil patel : win the SEO battle becomes possible thanks to the advanced analysis of keywords or domain names
  • Google Trends : coupled with Google adwords, an ideal open-source tool for analyzing keyword trends and the profiles of associated Internet users
  • Growthdesign : case studies of success stories of the most successful companies in terms of growth and customer experience.
  • MixPanel : an effective tool for analyzing and measuring user behavior and improving the overall experience of a site.
  • clearbit : identifies the phone numbers of prospects from their email address. API integrable with Salesforce, Zapier and Segment.

Discover the best start-up marketing strategies
There is no product without a strategy and a coherent and relevant value proposition!

Facilitation workshops allow the strategic projection of your product:

 

Product strategy
Product designer's bible in terms of product strategy

Knowledge is sharing the knowledge that makes us grow.
Olivier Lockert       

Dear colleagues, it's up to you!
 
Caroline Dumont, UX Designer @UX-Republic