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UX Tools 2023: What tools did designers around the world use this year?

December 7, 2023
interaction, UI, ui/ux, ux, design, design compass, logical design, user experience, interaction, product

A survey of design tools used by designers around the world in 2023 has been released. UX Tools is a project run by Jordan Bowman and Taylor Palmer. We create resources to help designers grow, such as tutorials, surveys, databases, and assignments.

At the end of the year in December, UX Tools conducted a survey on design tools among designers around the world and shared it for free. We're back again this year again. Last year, Figma's rapid growth and changes in collaboration-oriented working methods were noticeable. What changes occurred this year? Has AI had a big impact on designers?

designer's eye

There are still many job titles like ‘Product Designer’. Closely followed by UX/UI designers and UX designers. Whenever the design scene changes rapidly, new job titles often appear, but there was no significant change this year. Design team sizes range from 2 to 10 people on average. There are many levels of experience, but a high proportion of people have worked as designers for more than 10 years. Does this mean designers can work longer hours?

The Windows usage rate is half that of Mac. This is surprising. I thought everyone would use Mac. When it comes to design results, the web is stronger than the app. As web technology develops and the Internet environment improves, its use seems to be increasing. During the COVID-19 era, the use of digital whiteboards increased, but Miro, which was a strong player, gave up the top spot to Figma's Pig Jam.

It is often used in UI design, prototyping, and user research to accelerate work that was previously done with text. External tools include Visily, which allows you to create UI templates directly, and qoqo, which creates personas, as well as UIzard.

AI is not used in design as much as you might think. It is still used to help with text-based business processes. The most popular one is ChatGPT. It is said that it is often used for writing articles or organizing ideas provided by the Figma plugin. In addition, it is said that images to be used in products are created using image creation tools such as Adobe Firefly.

When it comes to user research tools, Usertesting and Maze are strong. When conducting user research, storage for storing insights is especially important, and it is impressive that Dovetail is strong in addition to traditional tools such as Notion or Google Drive.