10 Best User Interface Design Software Systems of 2023 for Product Managers

InVision is a popular visual collaboration tool that helps organizations reduce go-to-market cycles while increasing ROI. Interestingly, InVision claims that its platform helps spike up time-to-market cycles by 36%!

Why I picked InVision: As a product manager, it’s incredible having access to several templates curated for product building. InVision has great templates cutting through several critical categories, including product planning, product launch, customer journey, wireframing, sprint planning, and feature planning.

InVision’s Freehand is essentially a digital whiteboard for collaborating with stakeholders on a wireframe or mockup. You can leverage Freehand to bridge the gap, separating a low-fidelity product idea and a high-fidelity prototype. Additionally, if you’re proficient with Photoshop, you can copy-paste layers and other assets straight from Photoshop.

InVision Standout Features and Integrations

Features include a virtual whiteboard, real-time collaboration, app prototyping, rapid prototyping, creating prototypes from Photoshop and Sketch, prototype mirroring, swipe triggers, freehand mode, and others.

Integrations include tools such as Adobe XD, Asana, Azure DevOps, Google Sheets, Jira, Microsoft Word, Sketch, Slack, Spotify, Webex, Zoom, and others.

Founded in 2013, Marvel adds immense value to organizations seeking a simple and effective UI design tool. Marvel allows users to design wireframes, mockups, and prototypes straight from a browser.

Why I picked Marvel: As product managers, it’s critical to quickly create wireframes that give your thoughts and ideas some concrete structure. Marvel offers hundreds of wireframe templates specific to device types, including Android, iOS, and PC.

The prototyping features of Marvel are unique. In less than five minutes, you can transform low-fidelity design mockups into interactive prototypes without knowing how to code. Additionally, the Sketch integration is handy as you can import Sketch screens and add layers on the go.

Marvel Standout Features and Integrations

Features include rapid prototyping, wireframing, mockup design, a device-specific template collection, efficient design handoff, a Sketch plugin, real-time collaboration, team libraries for promoting brand consistency, and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Dropbox Paper, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Sketch, Smartmockups, and others.

UXPin was born back in 2010 in Poland. The founders created the tool to simplify some of their design and collaboration challenges. UXPin features a component-driven prototyping approach to promote efficiency and brand-design relevance.

Why I picked UXPin: The component-driven prototyping feature of UXPin never ceases to amaze me. Essentially, UXPin allows designers to build upon existing prototypes. Instead of visualizing and creating a design from scratch, designers use existing component libraries to design new products. As a result, your organization has better design and brand consistency.

UXPin enables you to ship designs complying with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - thus, fostering inclusivity. The prototyping capabilities are robust, with states, conditional interactions, variables, and auto layout at your disposal. 

UXPin Standout Features and Integrations

Features include component-driven prototyping, drag-and-drop designing, inclusive designing, interactive prototyping, remote collaboration, member tagging, a simple designer handoff process, and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools, such as Asana, Google Sheets, Jira, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Mosaic, NPM, Salesforce, Storybook, Zendesk, and others.

Justinmind is a fantastic prototyping tool for websites, mobile devices, and web apps. Justinmind helps you easily create highly interactive prototypes. Creating responsive prototypes was a hassle back then, but Justinmind takes all the sting out of such “code-heavy” design elements.

Why I picked Justinmind: I’m particularly interested in the interactive and responsive design features that Justinmind offers. With Justinmind, you can effortlessly add advanced interactive designs, transitions, and animations to your UI.

Mobile gestures like custom actions responding to triggers like a scroll, rotate, tap, or pinch help boost prototype responsiveness. Since the digital demographics of your audience would consist of different device types, Justinmind’s responsive designs ensure your prototype proactively adapts as per the user’s screen size and resolution.

Justinmind Standout Features and Integrations

Features include responsive prototyping, lists, forms, easy prototype publishing, team prototyping, efficient design handoff, design systems, a great collection of free UI kits, and robust plugins.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Azure DevOps, Clicktale, Figma, Jira, Sketch, UserZoom, and others.

Uizard strongly advocates for machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) powered prototyping tools. Uizard’s mission involves empowering non-designers to build interactive and digital designs.

Why I picked Uizard: I picked Uizard because of its no-design promise. I’ve heard of no-code earlier, but no-design is an exciting progression. Uizard’s Autodesigner feature (due April ‘23) enables users to create mockups by inputting ideas via text. You can consider Uizard to be the ChatGPT for UI design.

Additionally, you can upload screenshots to Uizard, and the tool converts them into mockups that you can edit. As a result, you can draw inspiration from websites and applications that align with your goals and sail from there. You can upload any random screenshot, and Uizard scans the asset to generate design assets. For product managers lacking design experience, Uizard is a great way to translate ideas into designs quickly.

Uizard Standout Features and Integrations

Features include a no-code and no-design UI, AI-inspired UX/UI designs, scanned screenshots to create mockups, attention heatmaps, a website/app copy generator, an AI-enabled theme creator, 100s of web apps, mobile and website themes, and others.

Integration details are currently not available.

Axure’s journey began as a solution for design and product teams frustrated with the typical software development lifecycle. Creating tools for better user experience (UX) design was among Axure’s prime priorities. 

Why I picked Axure: I’m impressed with the sheer amount of design firepower Axure packs. Axure enables you to create truly responsive and functional prototypes with many different event triggers and actions.

You can effortlessly implement conditional logic like the if-then-else sequence and bring your static prototypes to life. Axure Rapid Prototyping (RP) widgets help you with dynamic content for adding a new dimension to prototyping. Although Axure is primarily a UX tool, it's design and no-code capabilities are a real delight for product managers and UI designers too.

Axure Standout Features and Integrations

Features include rapid prototyping, real-time collaboration, functional prototype creation, user flow diagrams, adaptive and responsive views, dynamic content, conditional logic, interaction event triggers, and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Adobe XD, Figma, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Sketch, Slack, and others.

Framer’s vision is simple: help organizations build and ship stunning visual designs. Starting from a mere JavaScript library, Framer has matured into a robust web design platform. 

Why I picked Framer: Framer has an impressive stack and grid feature that helps you organize multiple objects cleanly. A stack is a layer group stacked horizontally or vertically, and a grid houses numerous layers in a structured pattern. Stacks and grids in tandem help create responsive web designs that adapt to different screen sizes.

Framer’s UI design capabilities are pretty extensive, with the tool allowing you to build different types of interactions, including forms, galleries, and carousels. Lastly, the multiplayer feature promotes effective collaboration. If you’re a bit techno-savvy, you can harness Framer to embed CSS codes and add an extra layer of customization.

Framer Standout Features and Integrations

Features include real-time collaboration, great UX/UI interaction features, drag-and-drop UI designing, a Figma plugin, site speed-boosting tools, a CMS (content management system), and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Bit.ai, Calendly, Formidable, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Notion, Sketch, Stripe, and others.

Founded in 2014, Zeplin aims to create software that enhances the design workflows of organizations worldwide. Several product design teams from reputable companies like HSBC, Starbucks, and Salesforce use Zeplin for creating UX/UI designs.

Why I picked Zeplin: I love the GitHub-like timeline experience that Zeplin offers against each screen. You can keep track of all changes made by different stakeholders, giving you a holistic view of how a design has progressed over time. This design version history feature also enables you to effortlessly restore your UI designs to a previous version for seamless comparison.

Zeplin allows you to organize screens into a logical hierarchy to streamline the designer-developer handoff process. User journeys are straightforward and fun to chart using Zeplin. You can “mouse-link” screens and create user journeys for a very clean UX.

Zeplin Standout Features and Integrations

Features include design version control, user journeys, Storybook and GitHub linking, a global style guide, and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Figma, Microsoft Teams, Sketch, Storybook, Trello, Visual Studio Code, Zapier, and others.

Figma has been plying its designing expertise for over a decade now. Figma strongly believes in real-time collaboration and advocates for cross-functional participation in the design process. As a result, Figma features excellent collaboration capabilities in addition to its state-of-the-art design platform.

Why I picked Figma: As a former product manager, I recall spending weeks chasing stakeholders for sign-offs on my wireframes. Moreover, sometimes a stakeholder comes up with a suggestion late in the process, forcing you to redo the sign-off process. Figma’s popular “multiplayer” feature enables stakeholders to participate in the live collaboration. Product managers and designers can “hover” over designs and jointly build a great UI. 

FigJam from Figma presents an online whiteboard with diagramming and sticky-note functionalities, making brainstorming fun and effective. On the design front, Figma has unique arc designs, a sophisticated pen tool, and auto-layout responsive features. You can also leverage automation with Figma’s widgets and plugins. 

Figma Standout Features and Integrations

Features include private extensions, plugins, widgets, a drag-and-drop interface, design inspection, easy export, intuitive prototyping, mobile application, dynamic overlays, embedded commenting, and others.

Integrations include tools such as Axure, Bubble, Flinto, Framer Web, Maze, Microsoft Teams, Mixpanel, Pendo, Principle, ProtoPie, Sprig, Zeplin, and others.

Mockups is a jack-of-all-trades in the design software industry, with the tool offering prototyping, wireframing, collaboration, design systems, and UI features. Mockplus features two flagship design products: Mockplus DT, which is UI-focussed, and Mockplus RP, a prototyping tool.

Why I picked Mockplus DT: I’m excited about Mockplus’ assets-reuse capabilities. As your team members work on multiple projects, the asset repository grows massively, thus making it challenging to enforce uniform brand-design guidelines. Using Mockplus DT, your teams can save layer styles, colors, and other components to an asset library. Consequently, your teams can use the same assets for future designs and drive consistency.

Mockplus DT also offers a vector UI design with an easy drag-and-drop vector editing tool. You can also use the proportional scaling feature to scale all elements and layer styles while resizing features.

Mockplus DT Standout Features and Integrations

Features include vector UI designing, a drag-and-drop editing interface, an asset library, smart asset distribution, proportional scaling, custom plugins, free UI kits, real-time collaboration, and others.

Integrations include 10+ tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Axure, Confluence, Figma, Jira, Lark, Sketch, Slack and others.