Five Essential Apps for UX Design

1: UXPin
A mainstay in the toolbox, UXPin is clearly made by designers for designers. A powerful tool for wireframing and paper prototyping, it’s flexible enough to handle sitemaps, persona descriptions or flowcharts. By allowing easy comment addition and tracking, collaborating on UX designs couldn’t be easier.

2: Perfect Pixel
Once added to any browser, Perfect Pixel puts a semi-translucent image overlay on top of any website, allowing a pixel for pixel comparison between your overlay and the original design. With a minimalist UI, separate overlays for each website, and no image size restrictions, this free and open source tool is constantly updated to keep up with modern tastes and designs.

3: CodePen
An HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code editor for your browser with instant previews of the code you see and write, CodePen is a great “playground” for developing new web code. By displaying a real time preview of code changes, bug fixing and testing new designs can be done in real time.

4: Sketch
An increasingly popular app, Sketch produces quick, beautiful wire-frames for a wide range of devices and screen resolutions. Sketch has become a mainstay for mobile app, product, and UX designers by integrating easy to use tools to align and measure frames.

5: A Whiteboard and Marker
Sometimes, you can’t beat a classic analog technique. Grab your team, book a meeting room, pick a marker color, and begin designing on the whiteboard. Why struggle by yourself with a problem when you and your coworkers can come up with a solution together?

Thanks to the Media Temple UX team for their contributions to this listicle.