The optimal product design tech stack — 2024

A list of all the tools, websites and software I recommend to all product designers

Hey, it’s Filippos 👋. Here is a list of all the tools, extensions, plugins, and software I recommend for Product Design and UI/UX in 2024 — I revise and update this list frequently; if you have any suggestions or requests, let me know in the comments.

Last updated: February 2024

🧪 User Research

• Userbrain ($) — For unmoderated user testing on live websites.

• Maze ($) — Product suite for unmoderated usability tests.

• Hotjar ($$) — Brilliant toolkit for in-app surveys, recruitment, and user recordings.

• User Interviews ($$) — Recruit users for interviews from a participant pool or from your own user database. Offers built-in scheduling and incentive management.

• Usertesting ($$$) — A complete user research suite for both moderated and unmoderated testing, better suited to scale-ups and enterprises due to high costs.

• Lookback ($$) — For unmoderated testing on mobile apps.

💬 Transcripts

• Supernormal — One of the best AI-powered transcript and summary experience for video calls, and also completely free to start with.

• Otter.ai — An alternative transcript tool with good team collaboration tools.

🎯 Collaboration

• Slack — Use Slack to exchange quick feedback, give context on what you are working on, and share research insights.

• Loom — Use Loom to record video walkthroughs of your work or give detailed feedback to designers or engineers.

• Screen Studio ($) — Record professional-looking video walkthroughs of your screen and product. Particularly useful for creating product onboarding videos without the need for an animator.

🎨 Design

• Figma — The only essential tool you need to know for interface design.

⚡️ Prototyping

• Figma — Use Figma for all standard prototyping and basic interactions.

• Protopie ($) — Optionally, use Protopie for advanced interactions, user input, and leveraging a device’s hardware features. I only recommend Protopie if you are designing mobile apps.

✏️ UX Writing

• Grammarly — Use Grammarly to fix basic grammar and syntax in your writing.

• Hemingway — Use Hemingway to improve the readability of your content and adapt it to different types of audiences.

• ChatGPT — Use ChatGPT to generate or improve copy for your product if you don’t have in-house copywriters.

Tip: Use Grammarly or Hemingway to improve your content. Use ChatGPT for generating new content or getting new ideas for adjusting your content.

📖 Documentation

• Notion — Notion is fantastic for design documentation. Create a repository of your principles, guidelines, onboarding processes, frameworks, and tooling.

🖋️ Whiteboarding

• Figjam ($) — A great whiteboarding option with a delightful and easy-to-learn user experience. Good for smaller teams with smaller budgets as you can have an unlimited number of drafts at no cost.

• Miro ($$) — Miro is still a fantastic tool and offers several advanced capabilities and integrations compared to Figjam.

👀 Inspiration

• Mobbin ($) — The most popular app screenshot gallery. Best if you are working on mobile, especially consumer-facing apps.

• Appshots ($) — Another recent app screenshot and flow gallery.

• Pageflows ($) — Browse videos and flows from the most popular web and mobile apps. Particularly good for B2B web products.

• Design Spells — Interaction details from well-crafted products.

🎨 Color

• Coolors — Use to generate new color palettes.

• UI Colors — Easy-to-use color shade generator.

• Colorbox — An advanced color palette tool that allows you to configure your color palette and ensure all shades are consistent.

• Supa Palette — A great color palette generator plugin for Figma.

⏺️ Icons

• Phosphor — One of the largest free icon libraries.

• Nucleo ($) — Icon library and organizer app.

• Streamline ($$) — The biggest paid icon library.

• Material Icons — Free icon library by Google’s Material Design.

📝 Type

• Fontbase — An optional, free font manager to manage all your installed fonts without slowing down your device.

• Typescale ($) — A robust type scale generator tool with free and paid options, great if you are setting up your type and text styles in your design system.

🧑‍🎨 Illustration & Visual assets

• DrawKit — Great library with free and premium illustrations.

• Undraw — A free, large repository of open-source illustrations.

• Wannathis — Free and premium 3D assets.

• Ouch — Free and premium sets of modern-style illustrations.

• Humaaans — An open-source library of illustrated characters.

🎥 Animation

• Rive — Robust engine for interactive, lightweight animations.

• LottieFiles — Browse readymade animations and create your own from within Figma (now with a text-to-video function)

🏞️ Photography

• Unsplash — The most popular free stock photo gallery.

• Bing Creator — Free GenerativeAI tool by Microsoft, useful for testing photography or illustration concepts before producing high-quality assets.

• Midjourney ($) — An incredibly capable GenAI tool that excels in realistic imagery.