Product Design Tools

Figma—the best collaborative product design tool ever made. Honestly it is so good and so fun to use as a team

~~Invision—good for brainstorming as a group, but Figjam is also super dope. Good bye Invision. What even happened to you?~~

Adobe Illustrator—the strongest, most robust, most complete, most comprehensive vector toolkit available in any software that I know about

Affinity Designer—up and coming vector software. very fast to operate and handles complex scenes. more in common with Illustrator than figma. Everyone’s worried, myself included, what Canva will do with this jewel now that it’s owned by them. I know! Lets add AI!

Pen and Paper!—the fastest way to get your ideas out of your head and into the hands of users. do not underestimate

Research Tools

Notion—such a great repository for your knowledge and user research. allows for collaboration, but not to the level of dovetail. what you’re currently looking at lol

Dovetail—Figma for user research. Collaborate on research, highlighting, tagging, and surface and share your insights. it’s literally awesome

Useberry—build usability tests to run and collect the results

Quip—another collaborative document platform, but not super feature-rich

Tableau—got data at scale? yes. yes I do. tableau can visualize it

Research Techniques and Methods

Interviews

Kickoffs and workshops

User Observations

Usability Studies

Survey building using Perceptyx and Qualtrics