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I made a site to explore the best UI/UX design tools out there
- corbins 6y agoYour list takes a while to populate on page load. I would add some placeholder rows and a loading indicator.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoYou are right, I'll add that.
- sktrdie 6y agoI'm sad we don't have an open-source alternative to these. Something like Blender but for UX design. Surely it's nice to have a backing of a private company but they seem to switch every few years. Before Figma, Sketch was the big thing. Probably in a few years something else will come up and require us to convert to that. An open-source alternative would perhaps make it more easy to adapt and change based on the community's necessities?
- rayrag 6y agohttps://github.com/akiraux/Akira https://github.com/akiraux/Akira
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt has already been added: https://sleekui.com/product/Akira https://sleekui.com/product/Akira
- rayrag 6y agoOk, but I wanted inform @sktrdie about Akira.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoThere was an open source Figma tool I ran into some time back with decent functionality. It was not Akira, but not sure that it was called. I'll try and find the tool and add it.
- rayrag 6y agoPencil? https://pencil.evolus.vn/ https://pencil.evolus.vn/
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoThanks, it has been added.
- petepete 6y agoAlso the best of breed, https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoCool, I'll add that.
- stephdin 6y agoThere is also Penpot, which was released some weeks ago. It is pretty usable and FOSS. https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257
- sktrdie 6y agoWell, that's cool.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt looks good, and amazing that it's open source.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt has been added.
- wx196 6y agoQuant UX? Don't have personal experience though. https://www.quant-ux.com/ https://www.quant-ux.com/
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoLooks interesting, I'll add it.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoGood point about scrolling on mobile, I'll look into fixing that.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoOh and I've added a few more UX design tools, Quant UX is open source.
- rayrag 6y agoWhy should I use your website over uxtools? https://uxtools.co/tools/design https://uxtools.co/tools/design
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI'm aiming to make something a bit more comprehensive, making it easier to compare tools with different feature sets.
- rayrag 6y agoOk, good luck. One thing I'm missing in both sites is lack of some search box, where I could type feature and I would show me which apps have it and which don't.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoThat's on the list of things to add for sure.
- taylorpalmer 6y agoIt's one thing to make your own comprehensive solution, but taking it directly from uxtools.co seems shady.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoAll data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way. The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.
- jrdnbwmn 6y agoYeah, this looks like a copy of UX Tools. Same exact layout and everything.
- 6y ago
- adventured 6y agoBreaks the back button (Firefox 87). Don't do that.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoAre you sure it breaks? I'm performing a temporary re-direct from the root url.
- seddin 6y agoYes it does happen to me too
- adventured 6y agoI hit the homepage. I click on Figma. That all works fine. Figma page loads, I browse the info on it. I click back, it takes me to the main page again. I click back to leave the site and go back to HN, it prevents that action. I hit back again, same result; I can no longer use the back button to navigate backwards. Yeah it broke the back button, for one reason or another. I'm 100% certain I can't traverse backwards using back. Just tested it again. Edit: tested it in Chrome 89.0.4389.114 (on Windows 10). Same problem.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI can replicate something similar if I visit the site via http and not https, because there is an application level re-direct.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.
- somedude895 6y agoIt also breaks on iOS Safari
- fredrikaurdal 6y ago
- xPaw 6y agoA website to explore UX tools and the first thing you see when you load the page is a popup asking to take a survey. I haven't even browsed your website yet.
- robtaylor 6y agoPlus it breaks the back button. Shambles.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoWhat browser are you using? I think it is the root url re-direct, but still looking into it.
- cj 6y agoThe problem is the HN post links to https://sleekui.com/ https://sleekui.com/ which immediately redirects to https://sleekui.com/category/design https://sleekui.com/category/design - when you hit the back button, it tries to go back to the homepage but then is redirected again. So it's not possible to get back to HN using the back button after clicking into your site. One easy fix is to edit the HN submission link (if it lets you) to link to /category/design instead of the homepage.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoYou can close it.
- Judgmentality 6y agoYou ask for feedback on usability, someone gives it to you, and your response is "you're using it wrong."
- petargyurov 6y agoSome feedback: * add some left and right padding, i.e. center the table or at least make it match the padding in your navbar * back button functionality is broken (Firefox 87) * Popularity metric doesn't really tell me anything at the moment (i.e.: a "progress bar" without labels is fairly pointless) * Some columns are too wide for their contents (e.g.: pricing) * Not sure the supplementary text is needed next to some icons (e.g.: The green tick icon in Version control is enough, the "View file version history" text adds nothing)
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoThanks for the feedback! Noted. I have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.
- joshspankit 6y agoAlso I would suggest a way to filter by each column. The result being that users could choose to see only apps that work offline, or only apps that have the pen tool and collaborative editing while still being free.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoThat makes sense, it is on my list of features to add.
- stephdin 6y agoMaybe you can add Penpot [1] It was released some time ago and it's open source and possible to self host. Featurewise it is comparable to Figma. [1] https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/ Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI'll add it some time today, thanks for the tip.
- majjam 6y agoNo PowerPoint? ;)
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoSounds like an interesting tool
- majjam 6y agoIt’ll never catch on
- krm01 6y agoFigma has been such a blessing while running our UI/UX studio. We work with technical teams (mostly SaaS) and Figma has 10X our productivity internally and made it a lot easier for the dev teams we work with to implement the designs. Having all files neatly organized in a shared online environment that isn’t platform specific, with all the inspector tools in place is huge.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt's difficult for Sketch to compete with Figma being platform agnostic.
- number6 6y agoI am a backend developer who somehow ended up a full stack developer... aka... you can do html so you can also do the frontend. So what is figma and for what should I use it?
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoYou can use it to make mockups, to plan the layout of your apps. And then use the markup output to build the front-end. Makes coding easier.
- finiteseries 6y agoSurprising to see XD in second place, I thought uptake was a bit lower than that. I’ve actually noticed more people using Figma as a (painful) Illustrator replacement than XD in the wild anecdotally, must be outside of my bubble.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt's very difficult to find a common metric that is reliable, unless I have user generated inputs for that. Currently, it's based on Google search volume. Mostly for the domain, but sometimes that is not possible, and for Photoshop I have to use "photoshop ui design" to get a good estimate for how popular it is among UI designers
- taylorpalmer 6y agoThere's a pretty reliable measure of popularity here: https://uxtools.co/tools/design https://uxtools.co/tools/design You may even notice it looks shockingly similar to OPs site.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoAll data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way. The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.
- 1cvmask 6y agoHow do you measure popularity? What does it even mean? Is website traffic your proxy?
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoIt's very difficult to find a common metric that is reliable, unless I have user generated inputs for that. Currently, it's based on Google search volume. Mostly for the domain, but sometimes that is not possible, and for Photoshop I have to use "photoshop ui design" to get a good estimate for how popular it is among UI designers.
- markestefanos 6y agoIt seems that in Figma's case search traffic will be extremely unreliable given that you navigate to the website to use it, while you use a local app for Sketch and others.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoThis is cool and would definitely be a useful resource if I were choosing a design tool right now. I see some other feedback but didn’t see this mentioned: scrolling on mobile is a bit disorienting because it doesn’t seem possible to scroll in only one direction. This is especially jarring trying to track the vertical position I was previously at as I scroll horizontally, and requires icon recognition.
- kyriakos 6y agoAdobe XD vs Figma as a developer I think figma wins. I get shared designs from both, Adobe xd URLs take ages to load and performance is extremely slow while figma URLs load quickly and are smooth even for huge designs.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoI started out with Adobe XD in the beginning, but Figma works so well.
- haxiomic 6y agoI don’t often like to rant but XD is fascinating to me as an example of trying to work out what went so wrong in building it. Every time I open it (and by force its companion Creative Cloud updater) it does something radical. Last time the updater just started playing a loud buzzing noise (like a crashed audio thread). If I have open a file open too long (a few minutes), it freezes then crashes when I try to exit. There was period where I’d have to click through slow you-don’t-have access dialogs to a file I do have access to. This is all on a single project over the last few weeks Adobe has brilliant engineers and talent and some parts of XD are well built and I want XD to succeed. It makes me speculate if it's a case of the original team being moved onto other projects or management exploring outsourcing
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoSome of those bugs are almost hilarious, but also a sad state of the software. The reason why I stopped using it was because every time I exported an asset, the image was blurry for some reason.
- kyriakos 6y agofact is that if XD wasn't part of Adobe's ecosystem it would have never gained any traction. It became as popular as it its because its pushed down with the same subscription as Photoshop and the rest of the gang so it makes no sense for someone who has the suite to also pay for another product but it is a very badly made piece of software even though they started it from scratch and doesn't have all the baggage that applications like Photoshop have. I do have XD installed just to view designs but I don't really design in it and what amazes me is how often it gets updated, almost weekly.
- taylorpalmer 6y agoThis looks exactly like https://uxtools.co/tools/design https://uxtools.co/tools/design.
- fredrikaurdal 6y agoEach tool has been independently researched, of course there are going to be overlaps when comparing some of the same services.