Prototyping/wireframing tools are the best communication method between interaction designers, project manager, and website developers. It’s a key step of web or mobile app development process. While in principle, the design of prototypes must be a product of interaction designers, and the user-centered concept shall run through the whole product design progress. The professional perspective and rich user experience of interaction designer will directly influence the usability of the product.
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Nov 01, 2018 If you've got an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you're probably already familiar with Apple's personal assistant software app. In fact, you already have it free with your device. What most people don't realize is that Siri can also be used as a voice dictation app for shorter messages or emails. For example, I was able to create a short note using Siri. Mockup Builder is a prototyping solution that helps design websites, software and mobile applications while reducing the time and cost spent on the negotiation stage. This tool efficiently combines. Animate Your Ideas, Design Better Apps Principle makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces. Whether you're designing the flow of a multi-screen app, or new interactions and animations, Principle helps you create designs that look and feel amazing.
Desktop-based Prototyping Tools
1. Axure RP (Mac & Win) | ($495/user)
Axure RP is a desktop application that allows designers to create, test, and share interactive prototypes. Been called as the most comprehensive (in terms of functionality) prototyping tools, it’s an ideal desktop software for both static, low-fidelity prototypes and more sophisticated, interactive prototypes. As an extremely professional UX tool, Axure requires a steep learning curve.
2. Mockplus (Mac & Win) | ($129/year)
Mockplus is an all-inclusive rapid prototyping tool supports for the mainstream platforms of PC, website, and mobile device. The packaged interactions components and creative preview method allow designers to design and preview within minutes. It is a solid prototyping app for professional UI/UX designers who want to produce high-quality prototypes but without too much longer learning curve. More powerful features including:
UI Flow Design Mode— Instant switch between Prototype and UI Flow design modes; Display the UI flow of all or some certain pages; Intelligent connections between pages which can be adjust manually; Display important markups of pages; Export UI Flow at once.
Repeater— Convert any component easily into a Repeater. Drag the border of a Repeater to create repeated elements. Your adjustments made on one component will be applied to all.
Demo Projects and Templates — Demo Projects: Well-structured demos for you to make reference. Templates: Various built-in templates help you to build your prototypes on them, easy and fast.
Sketch Import — Publish selected Sketch Artboards as a Team Project in Mockplus. Insert Sketch Artboards into a Mockplus Team Project.
Table Component— Like using the Excel, you can make any change to this new table component in a visual way. Not only can you insert, edit or delete a cell easily, but also set the styles and the text formats of one or multiple cells freely.
3. Justinmind (Mac & WIn) | ($228/year)
Justinmind is a flexible prototyping tool for web and mobile app prototypes and high-fidelity website wireframes. The rich gestures in Justinmind allow designers to better build gesture interaction mobile apps. Justinmind also requires a deep learning curve, such as value expression.
4. Balsamiq (Win) | ($89/user)
Balsamiq Mockups is a rapid wireframing tool that helps you work faster & smarter. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but using a computer. By comparison, Balsamiq is more focus on static and low-fidelity prototypes.
5. OmniGraffle (Mac) |($199.99)
OmniGraffle is a powerful design tool, it has extensive options for objects, canvases, templates, inspectors, and stencils to help designers set out to do something well, quickly. It has won the Apple Design Award in 2002.
Some other mockup tools:
Origami — A free tool for designing modern user interfaces (Mac) |
Adobe Experience Design — The first all-in-one tool for UX designers (Mac)
Prott — A new mobile app prototyping tool built for design teams (Mac) | ($421/year)
Principle — An animated design tool for interactive prototypes (Mac) | ($129/year)
So, the problem of how to complete a good prototype design that’s depending on how you choose prototyping/wireframing tools. Below are the most popular mockup & prototyping/wireframing tools& appsbased on the website, desktop, and mobile device.
Web-based Prototyping Tools
1.InVision | ($25/month)
As a web-based collaborative program, InVision is powerful at clickable & interactive prototypes, real-time design collaboration & share. InVison is an ideal choice for high fidelity design which is always impressive. The nice features such as Invision + Sketch, Invision + Adobe could be a great helpful for designers who pursue the high-end product.
2. UXpin | ($44.08 per user/year, starting from 4 users)
UXpin puts everything for designers in a UX design platform, also, it supports to upload file seamlessly on Sketch and Photoshop. Responsive prototypes and wireframes created by UXpin can run on different devices and resolutions. In addition, this software also provides version control and iterative function, you can easily share and preview prototypes by the intuitive and real-time collaboration.
3. Marvel | ($168 per user/year)
Marvel is also a web-based prototyping tool with good real-time collaboration. You can simply import mockup images from Sketch or Photoshop to link into clickable interactive prototypes for different devices. Just simple drag and link, you can bring your idea to life without any code experience.
4. FluidUI | ($99/year)
With built-in iOS, Material Design and Wireframe libraries containing over 2000 customizable widgets and icons, you can design and share a wireframe, mockup or prototype for any device or platform in minutes. FluidUI also features real-time collaboration for teams, video hangouts for user testing, on-device testing and interactive previews with chat/comments to share and iterate your designs with your team.
5. Proto.io
Proto.io is a very strong web app with many functions. Under the web-based environment, it supports rich gestures and touch style, such as slide, touch, zoom, press and other mainstream actions. With it, developers can create interactive prototypes for the iOS, Android and other mobile internet devices, and get feedback from users.
Some other web-based prototyping tools:
Pidoco — Online wireframe and UX prototyping tool | ($660/year for premium)
Best Mockup Software
Mockingbird — Wireframes on the fly | ($40/month for 25 projects)
Mockflow — Great design tools and collaboration services for designers | ($148/year)
Moqups — Mockup, wireframe & UI prototyping tool for creating hi-fi wireframes | ($228/year for Pro)
Gliffy — Mock up web pages quickly & easily with wireframes | ($480/year for 10 projects)
Wireframe.cc — Minimal wireframing tool | ($390/year)
Framer — Design tool for code needed | ($159/year)
Mobile-based Prototyping Tools
1. POP(Prototyping on Paper) (iOS & Android) | ($168/year)
Joined Marvel in the end of 2016.
2. Tapcase (iOS) |
TapCase lets designers create app prototypes from hand-drawn sketches and screen mockups. It’s quite fast and easy to create interactive elements by adding hotspots, linking target screens, and picking transition animations.
3. Marvelapp (iOS & Android) | ($168/year)
Marvelapp is a free prototyping app for mobile app, the whole design progress completed on mobile devices. Like POP and Tapcase, easily upload the prepared sketches or screen mockups, and add inbuilt transitions & gestures to make the pen & paper ideas to live.
Some other mobile-based prototyping tools:
Mockplus app — Easily & quickly preview prototypes on mobile devices by scanning QR code or input the view code. (iOS & Android)
JustinMindPrototyper — The prototype viewer for Justinmind prototypes (iOS & Android)
Mockup Builder — Super-easy prototyping and mockups (iOS & Android)
Live Wires — To quick wireframe & prototype for iPhone and iPad app (iOS)
Appcooker — Prototyping studio for iPhone & iPad (iOS)
Any of your favorable mockup & prototyping tool you think should be included in this list? Please feel free to contact me. Hope this article be useful to you great UI/UX designers!
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The wireframing process is the straight-to-the-point and completely non-tech stage of any web project. It only requires that you define a skeletal outline of essential page elements such as headers, footers, navigation and content area and should illustrate how to cater and respond to any possible interaction from a user.
It is the most important, yet underused, stage of any web or apps development.
It is the most important, yet underused, stage of any web or apps development.
Please note that this post is quite old, so some of these apps may not longer be free. Tread with caution.
There are several avenues you could take for sketching a wireframe, most notably pen and paper (the easiest and most cost effective way), but for the sake of this article we have focused on apps that are not only highly effective and easy to use, they are also completely free.
We have covered free wireframe apps before (here), but a year is a long time in web development – some of the apps we had previously covered are either no longer completely free or are no longer available. And as such, we felt that we should compile a new list with more detail and covering all areas of design including web pages, mobile apps and application dev.
As well as showcasing a variety of free apps (11 in total), at the bottom of the post, we have also highlighted some premium wireframing services that do offer free, yet limited, options. You may like to try them.
Unlimited Downloads: 1,000,000+ Wireframe Templates, UI Kits, Icon Sets, Web Templates, Themes and much more!
Lumzy – Quick Mockup Creation and Prototyping Tool
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With Lumzy, you can create mockups of how your site or application will function by adding events from the extensive list of controls on offer.
![Software Software](https://www.streambox.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/STREAMBOX_me_pro_mockup.png)
As well as having great tools for creating your mockup, you can also create Message Alerts, interactive Page Navigation, add Links to external content, and much more. It does offer a great set collaboration tools for live team editing and a chat engine for deliberating over designs. All of this and it is absolutely FREE.
Mockup Builder – A Killing Prototyping App
Mockup Builder has just recenly been released and looks very promising. It is feature-rich and versatile by allowing you create various prototyping styles, including: UI mockups, interactive wireframes, website layouts, desktop software prototypes and even sitemaps & screen navigation.
Of course, it does come with great collaboration tools for sharing with clients and colleagues.
Tiggr – Creating Prototypes Collaboratively
The idea behind Tiggr (currently in beta) is to give you the resources needed to create prototypes (for web, app or mobile) that look and feel like the final product. It allows you to design from a large number of components, share (via email, Twitter or Facebook), you can collaborate with any number of users and will generate an HTML/JS/CSS so that you can preview your UI mockups very quickly. A 10 second registration (email & password) is the only thing you have to go through to use this fantastic FREE tool.
Frame Box – Lightweight Online Tool for Creating Mockups
Frame Box does not have an extensive list of features (like the web based apps above). You can drag and drop, re-size and copy/paste the UI units, but its main focus, and why we like it so much, is that it allows you to create your mockup/prototype very, very quickly by using its very easy to use drag and drop interface. Again, this app is FREE and only requires a quick registration.
SimpleDiagrams Free Edition (Adobe Air App)
iPhone Mockup
With iPhone Mockup you have a choice of using either the Pencil styled editor (screenshot above) or the Illustration editor (screenshot below). Whichever editor you decide to use, the functionality remains the same: Its a very simple and easy to use app that allows you to create your own iPhone mockups very quickly, share them with other people at the click of a button, and any changes you make will by synced to everyone who has the mockup’s URL.
Mobile App Mockup Free
fluidIA
fluidIA is a downloadable web based design tool for prototyping rich user interfaces. It allows for rapid refinement and exploration of concepts using an object-oriented approach to design. The original idea behind fluidIA is to discover whether a group of interaction designers, IA’s, UX professionals and developers can create there own prototyping tool in an open way.
Progress on FluidIA has been a little bit slow recently, but the actual app works perfectly for designing a wireframe mockup.
Pencil Project (Firefox Extension)
Pencil Project is a free and opensource Firefox addon for designing GUI prototypes. With its built-in stencils you can create linked multi-page UI documents and finally export your mockup in either HTML, PNG, Openoffice.org document, Word document or PDF.
What more would you want from a wireframing app? This truly is an essential Firefox extension that any serious developer or designer should use.
CogTool – General Purpose UI Prototyping Tool (Standalone Application for Win & Mac)
CogTool is a FREE and powerful general purpose UI prototyping tool with a difference – it automatically evaluates your design with a predictive human performance model (a “cognitive crash dummy”). You simply create a storyboard of your design idea with sketches, images or on a canvas with CogTool’s widgets, demonstrate tasks on that storyboard, then press a button to produce a valid cognitive model predicting how long it will take a skilled user to complete those tasks.
CogTool offers a lot of support via its extensive user guides, step-by-step tutorials (video and articles), its forum and also offers example files to help you get started.
Prototype Composer (Community Edition)
It is a tool for prototyping data, processes, activities and most importantly, user interfaces. The application also works as a fairly easy to use Project Management tool.
The Community Edition is its free version which allows users to work in a sample project as well as in one user-defined project.
The Community Edition is its free version which allows users to work in a sample project as well as in one user-defined project.
DUB – DENIM (Standalone Application for Win, Linux & Mac)
DENIM is a free desktop application that is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X. DENIM describes itself as “an Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design”.
It combines many of the benefits of paper-based sketching with existing electronic prototyping tools.
It combines many of the benefits of paper-based sketching with existing electronic prototyping tools.
It allows designers to quickly sketch an interface, preserving the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced quickly and the medium is flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be annotated and modified.
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Premium Wireframe/Prototype Apps with a Free Option Available
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All of the Wireframe & Prototype & Mockup web-based applications below are premium services that do offer a free, yet limited, option. You may like to try them:
- FlairBuilder – Wireframes. Mockups. Prototypes
- Mockabilly – iPhone app mockup