Sketch is not a UX design tool

Interesting article.

Personally, I take a “process aligned, tools agnostic” approach. I don’t stipulate what tools my designers use to get the job done. It’s 100% up to them. I know of UX designers that expertly use PhotoShop, Illustrator, Balsamiq, OmniGraffle, Keynote, Sketch, and even a couple that still use FireWorks, or Flash religiously to mock things up, or create prototypes.

Use the tools you’re most comfortable with.

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I totally agree. I think that applies to many different industries also. It makes sense that someone uses tools that they use most efficiently, even if they’re not purpose built.

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My experience says that this is not always true.

Especially in companies where a lot of people are involved in designing, developing and maintaining deliverables.
The communication between designers and designers (eg UX and UI), designers and stakeholders and designers and third parties is crucial for increasing the speed and the quality of the shipped deliverables.

Finding the right tools to use can be a serious boost to the process.

I worked a lot with Fireworks due to the combo between vector and raster and the low learning curve because most of us were coming from Illustrator.
We decided to switch to Sketch 2 years ago and was a huge investment in terms of time and effort to make the old deliverables available within the new set-up.

Now we are very happy with it because of the huge amount of plug-ins and the high compatibility with InVision.
With the new feature to prepare the clickable prototypes directly in Sketch we can make the full process even faster.

I’m not saying that Sketch is the final weapon for delivering UI/UX but, it’s a matter fo fact, is one of the most responsive tools for each phase of the product design process.

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Ah yes – that’s a very fair point.

Don’t think UX design can be done with one or two tools. Or with what we call design tools.
Can you do UX without analytics?
UI design is a different story.

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@gultekin_irengun
in my opinion, good UX can’t be achieved only by designers.

A lot of usability issues are not related to design deliverables/solutions, it’s a matter of fact that good UX is made by people with different backgrounds and skills and, of course, they will work together using many tools.

I believe Sketch is a good tool because it’s able to provide a solid bridge between all these entities. Again it’s an important part of the company/agency strategy to evaluate, to test and to spread around the stakeholders the right “bridge” tool

I know that many of us in the UX community are sensitive about what is “UX” and what isn’t, primarily because most people outside of the community don’t really understand what our field is about. But debating whether certain tools should be labelled as UX tools or not seems a bit counterproductive to me. Any tool used during the process of improving the user experience is a UX tool as far as I’m concerned.

And if your UX tools aren’t the same as mine, so be it. [shrug]

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YES!

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