Category: User Experience

50 Awesome Wireframing & Prototyping Tools for UX/UI Designers

Graphics Design | User Experience | Web Design | Web Development

Are you a designer? Are you willing to build an app and website with the best wireframe tool? How many wireframing tools you aware till now? As a designer, you always looking forward to knowing how your website can build quicker and low cost. In the Market, there are lots of wireframing tools available with various levels of functionality. Some of the tools can be used essentially for simple wireframes and while others are for creating a prototype. One other way we can say that the wireframe tools make the method of identifying how to build an app or website basically easier. Nowadays Wireframe becomes more significant as it will earn it simpler to express ideas and reduce project cost. Here we’ve selected some of the best wireframe tools to help you to do a really simple design for your app and website.

• Balsamiq

Balsamiq is a fast wireframing tool designed to draw UI, websites, desktop and mobile applications.

• WireframePro

Wireframe.cc is a free and open-source wireframe software offers a simple interface for quickly sketching your wireframes.

• UXPin

UXPin is a web-based tool for prototyping web or mobile apps. you can quickly share and preview prototypes by the automatic and real-time collaboration.

• Prott

Prott is branded prototyping tool that covers a large number of UI tools for a quality of devices, from Android, iOS, and web.

• InVision

InVision is one of the most powerful prototyping tool that can transform your simple web and mobile designs into interactive wireframes and mockups quickly.

• Marvel

Marvel is a one of the best mobile and web-based prototyping tool for easy design.

• Proto.io

Proto.io is a very strong web-based design tool that offers simple and instinctive drag-and-drop UI with no coding needed, so it can much easier to use.

• HotGloo

HotGloo is a smarter way to design interactive wireframes and prototyping tool for the web, mobile, and wearables.

• Mockflow

MackFlow is a great designing tool for creative designers. it’s simple to use tool to create wireframes and paper prototyping.

• Axure RP

Axure RP is the well-known desktop application that allows you to design interactive HTML mockups for web and mobile apps.

• Pidoco

Pidoco is a UX prototyping tool based on webs that can be used to build clickable wireframe quickly.

• Moqups

Moqups is a modernized HTML 5 web app that helps you build sitemaps, mockups, designs, models, and developing functional prototypes.

• LucidChart

Lucidchart is one of the best tool for designing interactive sitemaps, demo-ready wireframes, diagrams, and modules.

• NinjaMock

NinjaMock is the free tool for agile prototyping and creating apps for web and mobile apps(Android, iOS, Windows ).

• InDesign CC

With the help of powerful wireframing UX-UI designing made simple. InDesign CC build an interactive PDF that works as a wireframe for your website or app.

• Photoshop CC

Photoshop is a very easy choice for designers. It is easy to describe quick ideas and build an effective wireframe.

• OmniGraffle

The Best Apple design Award-winning powerful tool OmniGraffle that has great choices for objects, templates, and stencils to improve designers set out to do something well, instantly.

• MockPlus

Mockplus is specially created on a mission to do quicker, smarter and simpler design. It allows you to do a perfect wireframe in a minimum of time.

• Framer

Framer is a screen design tool offers an all-in-one design workflow. It runs on iOS and it’s mainly used for when creating animated prototypes.

• Pixate

Pixate is a desktop-based prototyping tool enabling you to create animations and interactions wireframes.

• Mockingbird

Mockingbird is a web-based beta software gives an easy to use the platform. With the help of Mockingbird, you can create mockups of your website within minutes.

• Simulify

Simulify is a desktop and web-based application for designing mockups, wireframes, and prototypes.

• helio

fast, shareable wireframes, mockups, and prototypes

• Concept.ly

Concept.ly convert wireframes and designs into interactive apps for web and mobile (Android & iOS).

• ClickDummy

ClickDummy is online wireframing apps that turn mockups into clickable prototypes from your website, mobile applications and software mockups.

• Creately

Creately is a great easy-to-use online diagramming tool for designing quick Web Modules, Software Prototypes, Wireframe, Software diagrams and more.

• Lumzy

Lumzy is a essential, easy, Web-based prototyping tool for fast UI/UX prototyping.

• Cacoo

Cacoo is a cloud-based diagram with real-time collaboration in an easy way to share wireframes with your organization.

• Mockup Designer

Basic wireframing tool hosted on GitHub.

• fluidIA

FluidIA is a free open source project for prototyping open source projects.

• Justinmind

Justinmind is an advanced wireframing and prototyping tool for web and mobile apps without coding.

• RWD Wireframes

RWD Wireframes specially created for those designers who want to make responsive layouts quickly.

• Gliffy

Creating wireframes easily with the help of Drag & Drop functionality from the library to anywhere on the webpage.

• Wireframe.cc

Wireframe.cc is a web-based online wireframe tool offers a simple interface for quickly drawing your interactive prototyping.

• Pencil Project

Pencil Project is a free wireframe tool, which has won the Mozilla award for ‘Best New Add-On’ in 2008.

• Wirify

Wirefy is a browser-based responsive wireframe tool, which enables you to build useful wireframes using standard components.

• PowerMockup

PowerMockup is the widely popular framework that Converts powerpoint to wireframe in just one click.

• JustProto

JustProto is a web-based prototyping tool with a drag-and-drop feature to design extremely interactive prototypes.

• FlairBuilder

Premium tool for smooth creation of interactive wireframes.

• WireframeSketcher

WireframeSketcher is a wireframing tool to creates a great looking website wireframes and mockups for desktop, web and mobile applications.

• Serena Prototype Composer

Serena Prototype Composer is the best wireframe tool that building simple, high constancy prototypes that look like the real thing.

• Webflow

everything you need to add your own style.

• Vectr

Make your own wireframes and mockups unique by using our vectr editor.

• Atomic

Anyone can apply incredible authenticity to their designs in seconds

• Adobe Comp

Adobe Comp CC turns your crude shapes and lines into crunchy graphics.

• Principle

A principle is very easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces for web and mobile apps.

• Canva

Canva is a web-based online wireframe tool that offers website wireframe with the help of Drag & Drop functionality.

Are you still looking for a best web design company? Addon Solutions is a top-notch web design company in India and the USA that offers the most competing and modern web design services at affordable rates.

5 Ways Animated Microinteractions Can Create Magic for Your App UX

Mobile App Development | User Experience

We know an image is worth of thousand words and an animation is worth of hundred pictures. Therefore, we an animation, we can tell a story within a few seconds that we cannot describe with a full page textual content. Therefore, movie, video, and animation are a prime choice for designers to include as multimedia content in mobile application designs to bring life and fun to app users. Unfortunately, most of the animations can deliver the entire story or solve a high purpose, so the inclusion of animation in app UX designing has limited scope to be contextual in true meaning. A creative Web Design Studio focused on client brand strategy building, identity design concept and mock-up, print & packaging design and UX + UI Design for web and mobile applications. Leading User Experience & Interface UX/UI Design Agency in India

Animations for Microinteractions in App UX Designing

Therefore, designers have developed a new concept of animation with winked or blinked spanned animations. The tiny animation is termed as micro animation to describe the smallest or the shortest user interactions, hence animation for microinteractions. Now, designer community refers it as microinteractions only.

Examples of Microinteractions

For more clarity take some real world examples of microinteractions such as:

• When you switch on or off your smartphone, a vibration occurred as a notification that is microinteractions
• Depicting the loading animation when you tap/click on loading button
• Changing color and size of the button when you tap/click on add to cart button

Definition of Microinteractions

In terms of UI designing, microinteractions are consisting of product moments (in an app or web UI) to accomplish one small or micro task only. Literally, microinteractions are comprising four primary parts such as:

• Trigger to initiate an action
• Rules to define what is happening in an interaction
• Feedback to know what has happened
• Loops and modes to find out what is happening next

Roles of Microinteractions

The most dominant roles or functions of microinteractions are:

• Giving feedback of an action
• Finishing a task
• Enhancing a sense of manipulation
• Help to see result of the action to prevent errors

Thus, microinteractions are providing an appeal to the natural, innate desire of human being for acknowledgment.

Microinteractions Serve Multiple Purposes in App UX Design

Therefore, microinteractions are among the best components of UX to serve multiple purposes:

• User satisfaction by visual rewards
• Understanding of what is going with UIs
• Save users from uncertainty hence, frustrations
• Make users delight and deliver fun
• Provide clarity to UIs
• Deliver instructions and guide users by revealing information
• Give visual cues to pay more control over UI interactions
• Add details in UI & UX to meet higher expectations of advanced users

Microinteractions Can Bring Magic in App UX Design

The real beauty of microinteractions is in its briefness or shortness in every aspect of app UX, UI, and Usability designing. Therefore, they are giving immense opportunities to create magic in designing the app UX. We can identify five major ways that we can bring astounding results while designing app UX.

No.1: To Acknowledge System Status

By smart use of microinteractions, your app system can provide your users instant feedback regarding what is going on, so your users are abreast of what is happening with them while using the app. They have status updates so never should rely on guessing job. For instance, the state of the system while data uploading or downloading so users can know how much the process completed or remaining. Therefore, microinteractions help UX designers to follow the first principle of usability heuristic that keeps your users informed about what is going on in the app, on screen and behind it in the background.

No.2: To Make UI Elements Tangible

To create visual appeal in the app design, we use 3D designing techniques against the flat 2D UI elements. Unfortunately, it hardly works when a user interacts with a 3D UI element, and it remains flat. If you want to simulate real life buttons or controls like UI elements, you must bring a life them by making them tangible so they can act like real life components and give you feeling of real interactions with them. Therefore, you need to add some animations, which can show that some changes are taking place when you touch those UI elements such as changes in a drop shadow, colors, shape, and size of UI elements including buttons and controls. Thus, users can mimic the typical interaction of real life physical objects and manipulates elements accordingly. It helps to keep users engage with design and enhance app UX.

No.3: To Create Meaningful Transitions

During user journey, microinteractions animations help in smooth transitions of users between navigational contexts. Moreover, it helps in describing changes in the arrangements of screen elements, as well as can reinforce the hierarchy of an element. For instance, essential UI elements like icons can morph from one shape to another to serve dual purposes at different moments and in different contexts. Thus, microinteractions can help UX designers to create a visual connection between UIs or screens by adding more clarity to the understanding. Get done Best iPhone App Design and Services for your audience.

No.4: To Help In Onboarding

If UX designers can provide immaculate app UX and animation during designing for onboarding flow, it may leave stunning impacts on the first-time users to improve engagement and subsequent retention rates. Microinteractions can serve those purposes by highlighting the most significant features and controls in the app during onboarding. Thus, microinteractions enable users to reveal required info regarding app usage and efficiently guide them to hit their targets by reaching their goals with the smooth journey.

No.5: To Grab User Attention

During app journey, users have to pay immediate attentions towards important details and emergency tasks to accomplish such as notification. In due course, UX designers require a trick or technique to grab user attention without annoying them anyhow. Therefore, microinteractions provide excellent visual cues for users to pay attentions towards the details and act on swiftly. For instance, animation of ringing bell with sweet sounds can bring users’ notice towards incoming notifications.

Conclusion:

In the UX designing, every element design matters more and need attentions towards the details. Therefore, developing animations for microinteractions can bring magic to the mobile app in subtle ways. However, all app designers or UX designers don’t have enough expertise and experiences in designing animations for microinteractions. Therefore, you need to find out an impeccable team of mobile app designers to bring such magic for your dream app project, and Addon Solutions have such team of UX designers and mobile app developer India to serve you at premium rates.

How to Boost Your App Retention Rate

Marketing | Mobile App Development | User Experience

With more than 1.5 million apps in the various mobile App Stores, we have overcrowded the app marketplaces. At another hand, tiny handheld devices are incapable of storing a number of mobile apps on the disk and its icons on the home screens. If you think the app downloading rate, as a sole criterion for the success in the market, you are going to make a big mistake then. After downloading the app, engagement and retention of the app are vital for monetization or long-term success in the mobile app marketplaces.

Thin Line between User Engagement & User Retention Rate

Unfortunately, many app entrepreneurs and several mobile app developers hardly know the thin line between user engagement and user retention. In simple words, we can describe user engagement as the user behavior within an app and its metrics would be

1. The time spent within an app
2. How many key actions accomplished

Whereas, we can describe user retention as, how often an app opens and used. For better understanding, user engagement can measure with one-time usage while user retention relies on the frequency of usages means, several times.

Significance of User Retention Rate

No doubt, user engagement seats at the foundation of user retention, but it is not the sole criterion for success and most importantly, for monetization. If your mobile app lures the same user several times and remains in the system, we can say that it has higher average Life Time Value (LTV). Thus, LTV could be a useful metric for the measurement of the User Retention Rate. You can easily define the success of your app in the market based on the high or low LTV of your mobile application.

How to Improve the App Retention Rate

Literally, there are several ways to enhance the app retention rate, but all are never applicable in all situations and for all apps. If you think it, at the contextual points, decide that which one is applicable. When it is applicable and for which app, you might have high success rate. Let us check some of the effective techniques to boost your app retention rate.

Efficient Onboarding to Enhance App Retention Rate

After installations, many users hardly use app twice or thrice and sent it to the trash. After intensive research, it has revealed that only intuitive and easy to use apps remain on the home screen and used frequently. Therefore, developing an intuitive app is mandatory for engagements as well as retention. However, seasoned mobile app developers always try to develop intuitive apps that need little efforts to learn how to use them. Unfortunately, not all apps are of the same nature or kind that allows developers to make highly intuitive apps. Intricate app features and functionality lead to the development of the less intuitive app and mobile developers have to take help of the concurrent onboarding technologies and techniques to provide righteous guidance. Today we have tons of onboarding techniques used on mobile landscape such as

• Progress bars
• Tooltips
• Coach screens
• Training videos
• Interactive tutorials
• Email lessons

Therefore, if we want to introduce actually useful one or two in our apps, we need to classify them in following perspectives so we can decide their contextual significance and apply them accordingly.

1. Benefits-Oriented Onboarding
2. Function-Oriented Onboarding
3. Progressive Onboarding

You can find details that which technique is effective when on the web easily, as a lot of literature is available today.  

Apps for Users’ Routine

If you want to make your mobile app frequently used, bring it into the routine of the user. Normally, users use the product frequently when it involved in the routine life and used unconsciously as a bare need. If users make your app usage as a habit, they definitely will use it frequently and more often than other useful apps. However, it is not easy to create each app with such attributes, but there are several tricks to bring it in the habit and improve the retention rate greatly.  

Impeccable Customer Service Support to Improve App Retention Rate

Of course, each mobile app developer or a company tries to make app bug-free and problem-free, but in real life and varying use cases, it is hard to create such ideal product at once. Therefore, developers rely on user feedback and try to improve the performance or solve the problems of the actual users in next iterations or app updates. However, not all problems are major and need to address in app versioning; there are several minor issues that can be addressed by a team of marketing professionals or technical supports. They can solve such problems easily and offer immediate relief to the users or complainer. Therefore, a robust support service is essential to increase the initial and mid-way engagements of the scrappy users who used to use your app willingly. There are many ways to offer quick and long-term supports such as 24/7 instant messenger supports, user guides in the form of documents, FAQs, Videos, Tutorials, etc. are some instances to depict.

Judicious Use of Push Notifications

Usually, push notifications are deteriorating user experiences if not used is top and with appropriate tools or service providers. If you have content that indeed can add some values in the life or business of the users, push it on right time and in the lowest frequency, so users won’t get annoyed at all and inspire to pay attentions to your notifications. Therefore, seasoned mobile app developers prefer standard service providers such as PushWood, Parse, Urban Airship, and Appoxee.

Use of App Deep Linking Methods

Users need several external resources to be informed users and utilize the full capacities of the app. There are multiple ways to access such resources within a device, app store, and on the Internet. The app deep linking method is bridging the gap between native URL scheme and HTTP links. Mobile developers can use app deep linking within an advertise, in an email on mobiles, or in the social media messages and draw users successfully to the useful resources cited. Thus, these additional resources and such efforts increase the user engagements as well as inspire them to use the app more often than a normal app.

Offer Socializing Opportunities to Boost App Retention Rate

When you involve more than one users in your app at a time, natural human interactions will begin and keep the users engaged in the app as well as addict them to come back again-and-again. There are many ways to do it, but various games and competitions are great for deep and prolonged socialization in the mobile app particularly when multiplayer or multi-user activities are there. For e-commerce apps, direct integration of social media during buying processes offers opportunities to collect the opinions and reviews from the social circles for transparent shopping decisions.

Personalization

Offering personalized experiences on the web is not new, but in a mobile app with dynamic updates is tough to code and manage. However, with the advent of technologies and expanding web services including cloud service, now, it is possible to record the personal choices, behavior, and update the app content in dynamic ways using such services.

Real-time Updates

Everybody like fresh content and updated info. Therefore, app developers have to use real-time updating technologies for the products and content updates. Thus, we can retain the interests of a big audience on the mobile app and manage them in contemporary ways. Factors affecting the user retention’s are not static, but changing with the pace of time and technologies. If you are passionate to offer the best user experiences keeping those as mentioned earlier fundamental at heart, great user retention is not tough to achieve. Addon Solutions have a team of highly experienced and expert mobile app developers who are accustomed to all such techniques and know how to as well as where to implement which technique to boost app retention rate. What you need is to exhibit your trust by signing up your mobile application development project and ask the mobile app marketing team to infuse great app retention rate ingredients during and after the app development stages. Of course, we have tried to include maximum, and proven factors are affecting app retention rate in the post, though, chances are enough to miss any important one. Therefore, we request our esteemed users to add it in our comment box so others can know and leverage it in the next app development projects. Addon Solutions is a top Mobile App Development Company with over 500 apps built using different platforms. We have an expert team of iOS Developer and Android Developers in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Get in touch with our expert team.