We’ve all been there. You’re designing a web page for an ecommerce store or some new slides for a mobile application and then – boom – not sure how to proceed further. Will dog-lovers appreciate these tiny little paws at the front page or will they straight-up hate them? Is it clear we’re selling an AI-generated music app or do we need a brand new in-your-face banner?
No way to find out what future users will think without asking them. That’s why we’ve created a previous article on the Top 15 CRO and UX tools to Get User Feedback on your existing page and a new article you’re reading right now which pinpoints the top 15 Tools to Get Design Feedback for a Web page or Application as you’re still developing it.
Let’s take a look!
Proto.io
Trial: Free 15-day trial, offers a demo
Price: Plans starting from $29/month, free account (1 user, 1 project, 5 prototype screens, 10MB of storage)
Features: Drag & Drop Building Blocks, Scrollable containers, Sound Effects library, Touch events & Gestures, Lottie Animation (After Effects)
Proto.io, as you have guessed from its suggestive brand name, is a tech application focused solely and wholeheartedly on creating mockup prototypes. Proto.io started out with mobile devices and now helps UI designers build interfaces for digital cameras, gaming consoles, cars, airplanes, and Smart TVs.
This prototyping tool uses a simple drag and drop approach and requires no coding, albeit most of the tools you’re about to see in this list share this solution. Unlike other apps, it doesn’t offer an in-built user feedback function that conveniently does all the participant recruiting and demographic filtering for you. On a plus side, if you have been already using a third-party customer feedback tool, Proto.io does happily connect with Lookback, Validately, UserTesting, Userlytics and UXArmy.
If the last sentence does sound like something that works for you, Proto.io possesses a whole list of formidable features like video & audio controls, custom devices & skins, states & timeline animations, easings manager, version control, interaction areas and much more.
Optimal Workshop
Trial: No trial
Price: Plans starting from $166/month, free account (no time limits, unlimited number of studies, 10 responses per study)
Features: OptimalSort, Treejack, Chalkmark, Questions, Reframer, Participant recruitment
Let’s meet the second participant on our list of the 15 tools to get design feedback for a web page or application — Optimal Workshop. This upbeat customer feedback tool provides you with quality insights into what your users think as you’re still developing your web page or application. Optimal Workshop offers a whole range of tools and methods to measure user feedback on website structure, design, wireframes, and content using usability tests, user interviews and observations.
This customer feedback tool lets you choose surveying in over 80+ languages from a bank of 50 million participants from all over the globe, which can be filtered by country, age, education level, occupation status etc. And if you are looking for more granular targeted participant options, you can order their custom recruitment service which will collect user feedback from people with a particular hobby, car brand, holiday preference, job title, income bracket and much more. And if some of the surveys’ answers are unsatisfactory or insufficient you can always ask Optimal Workshop to replace them with new ones.
Their individual plan starts at $166 a month per user, team plan — at $498 a month for 3 users, and their Enterprise plan is expectedly custom-priced. They also offer a Free plan, which accommodates all five research methods from their main toolkit, but is not included in the official plan’s list and can be found if you scroll down the Pricing page.
Helio
Trial: No trial, offers a demo
Price: Contact sales for prices, free account
Features: Landing page conversion, Competitive review, Dashboard engagement, Brand perception, Ad funnel performance, Mobile navigation
The next stop on our list of the best UX and CRO tools to get customer feedback is Helio. Helio, formerly Verify, is a survey platform meant for asking design, product, and marketing questions. Unlike the previous tool, Helio designs it’s services for agencies and enterprises mostly, so although you also get a free account and a demo, you’ll have to call sales to find out about their prices.
Helio grants advanced behaviour filters, device type survey selection, a comprehensive test-creation toolbox that contains click test, preference test, point allocation, numerical scale, multiple-choice and other usability tests and survey methods. They also take care of other lead generation tactics that are rare for a typical survey software and include brand perception, competitive review, ad funnel performance, mobile navigation, dashboard engagement and finally — landing page conversion.
UsabilityHub
Trial: No trial
Price: Plans starting from $199/month, free account (free basis tests, extra $50 per upgraded tests)
Features: Audience split testing, Click visualizations, Funnel analysis, Open text analysis, Per questions filters, CSV exports, Device targeting, Task durations
The UsabilityHub is “a remote user research platform that takes the guesswork out of design decisions by validating them with real users.” UsabilityHub provides a comprehensive suite of surveys and usability tests that you can utilize on your own participants (invite your customers or integrate with an existing participant panel) or recruit from The UsabilityHub panel.
If you do decide to go with the latter, you’ll get quality-assurance, demographic targeting, and lightning-fast fulfilment (means you get a response in minutes) for $1 per participant. UsabilityHub also calls itself “your user research Swiss Army knife”, and awards first click tests, design surveys, preference tests and five-second tests, along with device targeting, task durations, heatmaps, open text analysis, audience split testing and other advanced design validation tools for professionals.
PickFu
Trial: No trial
Price: No pre-made pricing plans, offers a custom “Price per poll calculator”
Features: Advanced targeting options, US-based respondents, 1-Minute setup, Demographic info, Results in minutes
Do you have a book, a business idea, a logo, a product or an app you’d like people’s opinion on? Then hold tight, because we’ve got a special survey software just for you! PickFu (yes, that’s an official name) is an idea-validation platform that lets you connect your demographic to your product before you launch it, collects their impressions and finds out why they feel the way they do so you can make much more educated data-driven decisions.
PickFu stands out among other customer feedback platforms as it doesn’t only provide feedback on your web pages and applications, but offers an honest review on all sorts of products and services.
PickFu also prides itself on the US-based unbiased and truly-engaged respondents, who are paid and not forced into answering your surveys, who don’t see the answers of other participants, and who’s answers get automatically rejected if they contain low-quality replies or some form of gibberish. This customer feedback platform also allows you to build a personally tailored audience, which includes specific parameters like female, married, Amazon Prime member, mobile gamer, fiction reader or dog owner.
Frame.io
Trial: No trial
Price: Plans starting from $15/month, free account (2 users, 2 projects, 2 GB of active storage)
Features: Watermarking, Single Sign-On, Cloud-based storage, Version management, Custom-branded presentations, Side-by-side comparison
Now Frame.io is perfect for those creating ads, movies or any other types of video content — collectively. Frame.io is a cloud-based collaboration platform, and according to them “the only video collaboration platform that voluntarily complies with both TPN and SOC 2 Type 2”. And if you love what you do and have a whole team of film-loving individuals — this is a perfect design feedback tool for you.
Frame.io presents frame-accurate comments, drawing annotations, real-time conversations and approvals, side-by-side shot comparison and seamless integration with Watch folders, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro X, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer along with a thousand different apps and systems.
Frame.io is also proud of its speed on uploading (5GB in 10 minutes to Vimeo, in 7 — to Box) and offers a payback on investment in as soon as 3 months, 870% ROI in 3 years, and even 26% more productivity in post-production. Frame.io also has a tablet & mobile app that lets you edit, comment and organize on the go and also happens to be an Apple Design Award Winner.
MockFlow
Trial: No trial
Price: Plans starting from $19/month, free account (1 user, 1 UI project, 3 pages, 2 reviewers per project)
Features: SiteMap, DesignCollab, Design Meetings, AnnotatePro, StyleGuide, WireframePro
If you have a big team and you all usually have something to say, MockFlow could be a perfect fit for your work family. MockFlow makes it easy to collaborate with all of your coworkers on a single app prototype, where you can sketch interface ideas and supplement it with pre-built components, while others add annotated comments and talk over design approvals — all in real-time editing.
It’s also easy to stay consistent with embedded StyleGuides and auto-generated documentation from wireframes, so anything that can be automated MockFlow automates for you. MockFlow takes on all aspects of user interface planning, starting with idea generation, site map drawing, approving with colleagues using Design Meetings and DesignCollab software and finishing up with AnnotatePro — an application to illustrate UI designs with annotations and interactivity.
Axure
Trial: Free 30-day trial
Price: Plans starting from $25/month
Features: Connector Mode, Flow Shapes Library, Conditional Logic, Adaptive Views, Dynamic Content, Animation Effects, Code Export
Axure, or Axure RP 9 Pro, is dedicated to creating web page and application prototypes. It does not have a built-in user feedback system, so you’ll have to look for that elsewhere, but it does offer team project creation, where multiple co-workers can collaborate on a diagram formation, prototype building or design feedback in a single Axure file at the same time.
Axure also lets you share your freshly-baked prototypes and artboards with ease and, we quote, “gather feedback on top of your screens”, whatever that means. This app prototype tool went quite big on the technical side of the issue and entices its users with dynamic content, conditional logic, animation effects, automated redlines, complete documentation, and code export.
Balsamiq
Trial: Free 30-day trial
Price: Plans starting from $9/month for a cloud version, from $89/month for a desktop version
Features: Interactive Prototypes, Re-usable Symbols, Drag & Drop Simplicity, Wireframing Academy
Okay, soo, the first thing you see after visiting the Balsamiq website is a bunch of smiley faces and a lot of red colour. It’s hard to tie together how all of these elements relate to the balsamic — a favourite vinegar of many Italian families — or the way everything in this web app is designed in a sketch-like manner, but let’s proceed with our design feedback tools review.
As you can see from the screenshot above, all prototyping done in Balsamiq supports a low-fidelity wireframing theme, which resembles doodling around a sketchbook or a whiteboard. This child-like graphic style is meant to heighten your brainstorming capabilities and help you focus on the structure and the content of your web page or application, which is quite useful in the early stages of the UI design process.
Balsamiq is also big on learning, so if you have no previous experience in designing web applications worry not — you can easily join free Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, which presents countless topics and tutorials on how to design effective web page buttons, use visual hierarchy or start a successful wireframing project.
Flinto
Trial: Free 14-day trial
Price: One-year license for $99
Features: Animated Transitions, UI Drawing Tools, Sound Effects, Micro-Interactions, Haptics, 10+ Gestures
Flinto or The App Design App, helps web developers all over the world create live-like prototypes for their future iOS applications. We’re going to be straightforward and disclose right away that the Flinto app is great for independent developers, small agencies or emerging startups. It is a downloadable application that runs only on Mac and costs as little as $99 for a full one-year license.
Flinto would be loved by those who enjoy iOS culture because its interface resembles any Mac app and needs no further onboarding. Flinto design app tool also offers built-in gestures, haptics, video layers, 3D rotation and a pretty advanced vector drawing tool, which allows you to create your own icons instead of having to use Sketch or Figma, although the native connection to those two, including Dribbble integration, is also part of the Flinto experience.
They also have a pretty active community with over 100 tutorial videos to help you master the tool. In order to speed up your creation process, Flinto lets you test on-device in real-time within its iOS app and send out Flinto files to anyone who bought this Mac app or uses the free iOS viewer.
InVision
Trial: No trial, offers a demo
Price: Plans starting from $9,95/month, free account (10 active users, 3 documents, unlimited public spaces)
Features: InVision Cloud, InVision Screen Design Studio, Design System Manager
Just like other UI prototyping tools we’ve met before and about to meet forward, InVision provides a list of comprehensive tools for interactive prototype creation, team communication, freehand drawing, project management and receiving instant feedback from your co-workers on your latest design progress.
Similar to a well-known Pinterest board concept, InVision takes digital whiteboards and brings them to the next level with sketch tools to upgrade, annotate, and tie application prototypes together. They also have their services split into 4 separate categories – Cloud (the one used for prototyping and inspection), Studio (their custom screen design tool), Design System Manager (connects design and code among teams), and Enterprise (all of the above apps placed in a single venture package).
Brackets
Trial: No trial
Price: Free
Features: Inline Editors, Preprocessor Support, Live Preview
If you haven’t expected to see a free design feedback tool in this list – here’s a surprise for you 😉 Brackets is an open-source text editor that helps web designers and front-end developers design in the browser and is the only all-way-round free app on our list of 15 tools to get design feedback for a web page or application. Due to its free nature, Brackets is, understandably, not packed with a whole bunch of sophisticated tools or comprehensive usability tests, but delivers exactly what it promised and offers some great add-ons.
While using Brackets you get a live preview of what you’re creating thanks to a real-time connection to your browser. A quick change in your CSS or HTML and you’ll instantly see the upgrade on your screen. Created by Adobe Systems, Brackets currently resides on GitHub and offers preprocessor support, inline editors and a whole list of staggering extensions.
Sketch
Trial: Free 30-day trial, offers a demo
Price: Plans starting from $9/month
Features: Sketch Assistant, Customizable workflow, Vector graphics, Shared Cloud Libraries, Free developer handoff
Yay, Sketch! If you haven’t worked directly with this digital design toolkit, you must have heard about it at least once from your colleagues, friends or love-interests, because that’s how popular Sketch is. With over 1 million users, this advanced prototype tool is getting better and better, now starring Sketch Assistant and some cutting-edge team collaboration features.
Although Sketch is a Mac app, it’s shared Cloud workspace allows everyone on your team to get instant access to your prototypes. Developers can easily audit your designs and export all required assets with free browser-based tools, no Mac app needed. Free developer handoff, shared cloud libraries, easy project management from a single dashboard make it easy for teams to realize prototype previews for user testing.
UXPin
Trial: No trial, offers a demo
Price: Plans starting from $24/month, free account
Features: Built-in libraries, Vector drawing tools, Real-time collaboration, Conditional interactions, UXPin Mirror
UXPin comes in cocky, declaring it is “The only design and prototyping tool you need. Replaces Figma, Sketch, Axure, InVision, and Zeplin.” Although at first, their statement seems a bit over-confident, once you take a look at what they have to offer you surprisingly kind of get their presumptuousness.
First things first, the user interface of their own website is quite amazing. Unlike all other tools we’ve seen previously, they went with a dark theme and a graphically-pixelated setting, and by using a narrative like “Revolutionary technology that connects design and engineering. Lets you import and sync code React.js components from Git repositories to the UXPin Editor” this UI design and prototyping platform intrigues, dazes and beckons you into their own world of magic and mystery.
Being available on Mac and Windows, UXPin is a browser-based software that lets your designers and developers work on one prototype in-real time directly. Gathering team feedback, giving out task assignments, creating style guides, sending out approval requests and sharing your prototypes is a matter of a single click within the UXPin universe. They also offer a whole list of articles comparing themselves to Marvel, Invision, Sketch, Balsamiq, Axure and other UI prototyping tools so your UXPin account really becomes one place for all your prototyping needs.
Marvel
Trial: No trial, offers a demo
Price: Plans starting from $12/month, free account (1 user, 1 project, 1 user test result per project)
Features: Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing, Developer Handoff, Integrations, Collaboration
Marvel prototyping and user feedback platform, just like their famous homonym, is a thrilling, colourful universe where anything is possible. If you are serious about design creation and like everything in one place, Marvel could not be a better fit for you. Here you can wireframe, prototype and receive customer feedback, instantly generate design specs, and discuss with your team what are the next steps on your product development journey.
From a simple idea to a full-functioning application, Marvel optimizes your design-to-development process making sure all parts of the mechanism are interconnected and each team member has access to the latest update in real-time. When it comes to user testing, Marvel offers video, voice and analytical customer feedback on your newly-created designs and prototypes.
Voice transcription, targeted participant recruitment, feedback quality control, event tracking and other advanced survey software features help you receive high-value feedback and seamlessly integrate it within your developing app.
Conclusion
Since you clearly cherish (just like we do) the ever-growing world of data, design and technology, take a look at our other articles on similar topics. We know you’ll love them dearly 🙂
