UX Design: Our five ESSENTIAL tools!

hi everybody I'm Brittany from AJ and smart in this video today I'm gonna go through the top 5 industry standard tools that every UX and every product designer needs to know about so in this video I'm gonna walk you through the five tools that here at AJ and smart we use on a weekly if not daily basis I'm gonna give you a brief overview of each tool I'm gonna actually tell you why we use these tools and kind of how we use them as well so before I dive in please feel free to add anything in the comments ask us questions about the tools we're using if you want to know more information about a specific tool we'd love to hear that and then we'll make a video so we're gonna go through figma real time board Basecamp slack and appear in so being familiar with these tools knowing a little bit about them even just to start is really gonna set you up to be out sort of like the industry standard first up is figma now figma is a prototyping tool that we use at AJ and smart on a weekly basis to build prototypes really quickly for our clients now I want to just have a little disclaimer here that we did used to use sketch we used to always do our prototyping and sketch but what happened was we are prototyping so quickly and we have so many people so many different designers working on the same prototype that it became kind of annoying to use sketch right we had to like path files to each other and we found that actually we needed some way to collaborate in real time so we decided to use figma one of the biggest reasons we obviously made the switch to figma was that it actually allows for real time collaboration really really handy another reason why we chose figma as our tool is because actually it has a similar interface to sketch so if you already know sketch you can really easily like move into figma without a lot of you know barrier to entry super obviously very intuitive easy to use so you can actually have a team library where you're gonna have you know a set of UI interfaces that you can use on a regular basis so another reason we use figma is if we're working with a designer from the client side and they want to collaborate with us they don't have to download any additional tools they don't actually have downloads pignut themselves they can just use it in their browser this is a huge huge plus for us here at aging and smart okay one setback obviously in figma if you're already using it is that it doesn't have built-in animations so that is a little bit annoying but what we do to combat this is we actually take our files from figma import them into Marvel and then we're actually able to piece together a really nice-looking prototype that actually feels real as well and uses all those kind of common interactions so figma for us we found is just the best prototyping software that we have come across next up we have real-time boards [Music] all right now real-time board is essentially a digital whiteboard we use it a lot because we're often working with clients in the US or other time zones so we need to work with them remotely and this tool is the best we've found so far so with real-time board the biggest thing that we actually use it for which case sounds a little bit silly is recording user feedback when we're running product tests so it's such a great way to really quickly in real time um write down basically all of the feedback from the users and post it up so that the client can kind of follow along and see what's going on in the tests it's just so much easier we used to be recording on post-its and then transferring that digitally and just didn't really make a lot of sense so now we're using real-time board we're capturing feedback during user tests if you're running any kind of remote work where you want to show something visually and have the client be able to see it and you guys can kind of have this nice collaborative environment real-time board is definitely the way to go next up we're gonna look into a peer in if you get it because I came out like I appeared I don't know where I've know if the joke lambda to be honest cone Tunisia okay next up we have appear in so appear in is basically just a software to have meetings remotely right so it's like Google Hangouts but better you send the link to someone they click it and there they appear in the meeting appear in is basically a very simple software that we use to record our user tests we're often doing user tests remotely so it's super important that we record them and so that we can actually go back look through them take it to kind of a deeper look get some more insights from them with a peer in you can obviously record your meetings which is what we do so that we're recording our user tests that are happening remotely that's what we use it for so we actually also use a program called moon and we use appear in and bloom at the same time loom is kind of like our backup it automatically uploads as it's recording which is great the thing is was appear in is that you actually have to upload let we'd have to take that and upload it later for the client so that's just a little bit of an extra step that's a bit annoying for us so we use both of them we haven't actually found a perfect solution for this so feel free to let us know below what you're using okay number four is Basecamp huh right I don't know why I did that I just really love Basecamp I mean Basecamp is a project management tool so it's not anything earth-shattering but what's so great about Basecamp is that you can basically have every email correspondence for a certain project all in one place that's why we use it we very rarely actually email each other or the client after a project has started we kind of try to keep everything in Basecamp so let me just pop this open this this is like an internal project that we were working on so we kept everything every correspondence between all team members within this Basecamp tool and it's just so much easier when everything's in one place what's really cool is if you're using Basecamp with your clients it will actually like all the messages will be sent to their email so it will look as if they're getting a regular email and they can then also respond within their email but it will then go to Basecamp so it's actually a really cool work around just in case you're working with you know a client that doesn't know how to use Basecamp or just you know you don't want to force them to use a new tool if they're already in their email so that's what how we do it you can have tons of stuff I don't know we have any to do's in this no of course no to do's but like basically for us we use a lot of the the message board so actually within Basecamp all the projects are gonna be kind of siloed in their own corner so you're actually not having to browse through all like the whole platform to find a specific project every email every message correspondents document to-do list whatever is all in one one spot one place we can message all of the people we can give kind of like an overview of what happened we usually had a lot of photos and stuff that we toss in there for the client so it's super nice for them as well visually they can see how hard they worked and also for you if you're working with a client remotely you can kind of send them photos along so they can feel like they're a part of the project Basecamp is really really excellent to use oh that's nice nice photo of AJ and smart oh yeah but yeah highly recommended obviously we're big fan of Jason freed as well but Basecamp as a tool is super super great for any kind of project work okay I saved best for last I have to say slack is one of our favorite tools this is actually probably the tool we use the most across AJ and smart basically we use it it's a communication tool it's a messaging tool for teams okay so let's go into like so basically this is kind of cool how we organized our our slack so on the side here you have all the channels that you that we've made so this is all the the channels within AJ and smart some of them are locked so this means that only certain people are allowed in them and some of them are completely well public within the company and then of course you have your direct messages here so those are all my teammates that I'm talking with all the time what I love about what we've done with slack is we have these channels like for example interesting links where we actually post cool things that we've seen around in the tech space in the product space quite often actually on Instagram I will do kind of like an overview like a top three interesting links of the week so definitely follow us on Instagram if you're not already we go through that all the time this isn't a public channel many people have asked for us to make it public but this is an internal thing and it's just for us to kind of share with each other we also have one called lightning demos now this is very designed sprint specific but they're basically these are all cool products in certain spaces that we've kind of want to keep an eye on for what's going on in kind of the world of digital products and then we also have a really nice channel called love which is one of my favorites this is where we post like nice things that people have sent us you know notes people people saying that they like really love what we're doing whatever it kind of is like that feel-good warm fuzzy channel so slack is an excellent tool to use if your corresponding really often with your teammates it's just much more streamlined and it's really fun okay so those are the top five industry standard tools that we use here at AJ and smart on a weekly basis if not daily basis I know it was kind of a brief overview but if there are any tools that we mentioned that you'd like us to do a little bit more of a deep dive into let us know in the comments and we'll definitely make that happen so if you like this video please do give it a like if you haven't subscribed yet to our channel we'd really love if you did we're putting out weekly videos on product design UX design product strategy we're talking about the tech world in general it's a really fun place to be so please subscribe also we have an Instagram account I don't know if you knew that already but we do and we give actually a daily look at what's going on in our agency what we're working on what we're using interesting links all of these cool things so definitely follow us there and then of course if you're not listening to our podcast yet so that's actually hosted by Jonathan Kourtney our CEO and Jake Knapp they actually talked to some of the biggest people in product design for example Julie Xue who's the VP of product at Facebook Jason freed CEO of Basecamp that's also a fun one thank you so much for watching have a wonderful day and we'll see you next time if that was I mean ever if you're sorry that one is sketch is very well we can cut that part out okay another reason is all right next up is appear in oh my god yeah oh no we're just my god what is this let us know in the comments let's have a little conversation down there you know what's up right hey everybody what are you doing okay so I'm not gonna say about sorry that wasn't weird so those at the top I just spat did you see it it was like okay yeah exactly damn it 4k okay I've got them all in one one try that's pretty good [Music]