Tools
Tools are tools. For years, there have been ongoing debates ad nauseum on teams, in social media, or between designers on the latest and greatest design tool to rule them all. Here’s what I think:
Today’s tool could very well be gone tomorrow. Once you learn one tool, it’s not difficult to learn another. And another, and then another. The latest tools that designers are talking about will shift and are guaranteed to change within a few years. I started out my career in design when Fireworks was the thing, that was slowly being pushed aside by Sketch. Moved to another role where Axure was the name of the game. Since then multiple roles have required fluency in Sketch until more recently Figma came knocking at my door. My large team is still working on that migration due to various organization and budget reasons, but it’s coming. And that’s just within my 11 years in the user experience space. There is plenty more to come.
True interactivity is not prioritized for a lot of these tool’s product roadmaps. I’m talking complex form inputs with multiple streams of designed logic created by the designer, that truly demonstrate what users experience as they interact with the user interface. For that reason, I miss Axure. Today’s tools require too many steps that essentially are superficial in manipulation - they force designers to duplicate the same screens with the exception of one minor change in the designed user interface in order to express an interactive movement. Sure Axure was by no means a visual design tool, but its mental model in creating truly mapped to what true user interaction entails.
My advice for all designers of different specialties is to avoid being binary and dogmatic in your choices of tools. Be fluid, because the longevity of your career depends on it - be flexible and open to learning new tools, whether it be design and prototyping software, browser dev tools to design QA your work handed off to developers, a new front-end framework, or data reports to analyze your work’s impact.