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Get some more interesting and useful tools that can set the agile teams in the right shoes to overcome design collaboration challenges.
Design is crucial in the development lifecycle. Web design deals with two basic aspects: User Experience and Visual effect. No design can excel in both without inputs from the outside world(non-designers).
Designer’s experience leads to good designs but feedback and collaboration lay the sound foundation for great designs or great experiences to be exact.
Change is inevitable in the dynamic web design environment. Agile teams embrace and empathize change with short design and development sprints.
In each sprint, they complete the loop right from pitching an idea to brainstorming to prototyping and finally coding. At each step stakeholders(internal as well as external) collaborate and collate feedback to improve and iterate.
This iterative process of gathering feedback and acting on it can easily get unmanageable without the right tools to collaborate on the design and share feedback. Here are some tools that can set the agile teams in the right shoes to overcome design collaboration challenges.
1. ZipBoard
ZipBoard is a design feedback tool that allows the internal team members as well as external stakeholders to share design feedback in real-time. Anyone who has the access can click screenshots and annotate over the design to intimate issues and problem areas.
Directly pinpointing issues adds visual context which eases the feedback collaboration and communication. All these feedback comments can be made as trackable tasks which can be prioritized, assigned and tagged. You can use zipBoard to gather feedback for websites, web apps, HTML pages, images, pdf, and SCORM content.
Pricing:
zipBoard has a 30-day free trial and a one project free forever plan. Paid plans include:
- Starter($ 29/mo for 5 projects)
- Team($ 59/mo for 20 projects)
- Enterprise(custom, unlimited projects)
2. Marvel
Marvel is a web-based app that allows you to make your designs from scratch by using a simple design tool called Canvas. Also it provides you with an easy way to turn your sketches, imported design files or images into real-time mobile and web prototypes.
With Marvel Teams you can create and join as many teams as you like. It helps you to collaborate with your team and friends on different projects. You can share your projects and get real-time feedback on your designs. Clients and friends can comment directly on each screen or drop annotations.
Pricing:
Marvel is free for one user who can work on two projects. Paid plans include:
- Pro($16/month or $14/month billed annually)
- Company($64/month or $56/month billed annually)
3. Pageproofer
Pageproofer works great for website feedback. You can choose either all users can give feedback or only the invited ones.The feedback is added as a virtual sticky note.
If you have allowed a user to see pageproofer on your website then only s/he can add their feedback to your website. When such an invited user is browsing through your website s/he can directly add comments as sticky notes to your website.
All these notes can be managed at one place. The kanban view makes it easy to track the project progress.
Pricing:
Pageproofer has a 15 day free trial. Paid plans include:
- Freelancer($20/mo, 5 users)
- Studio($35/mo, 10 users)
- Agency($75/mo, 25 users)
- Enterprise($125/mo, 50 users)
4. Avocode
Avocode is a great tool that helps you to access designs created in Sketch and Photoshop to extract CSS, Swift etc. and import them in the code.
It provides multi-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can add team members and manage the permissions for specific projects in your team.
It allows you to send public links to third-parties to comment on the design. You can add comments in your design by just highlighting the object on which you want to give your feedback.
Pricing:
Avocode has a 14-day free trial policy. Paid plans are
- Garage($8.99/month or $6.75/month billed annually)
- Business($12.99/month or $10.00/month billed annually)
- Enterprise(Custom Plan).
5. Sympli
It is a design handoff tool that helps teams which work on Sketch, Photoshop, Xcode, Android Studio. You can easily import your Sketch and Photoshop designs to Sympli and then the developers who have access to Xcode and Android Studio plugins can directly extract the assets.
It automatically generates specs, style guides for the developers. It exports all the assets for all the screens rather than exporting assets that appear in a particular style guide.
Sympli also integrates with Slack where it shares updates on designs enabling seamless collaboration.
Pricing:
Paid plans are
- Starter($15/month or $13/month billed annually)
- Pro($25/month or $22/month billed annually)
- Company($100/month or $90/month billed annually)
- Enterprise($400/month or $360/month billed annually)
6. Conceptshare
Clients can markup the problem areas and share comments easily. You can also visually compare two different versions and get feedback on them. You can invite users to review your content.
Using the invite link users can access your files and can review it. There are two types of reviews available. One is feedback and other is approval. Also, external collaborators can access the open review only for 90 days after they have been invited.
You can also manage versions of your content. You can use conceptshare to get feedback and approval on web pages, Images, documents, video and audio as well.
Pricing:
- Custom pricing
7. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a user testing tool that keeps track of visitors action on your web design. It is inexpensive and easy to use conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool.
Features such as heat map and scroll map help you to get an understanding of how visitors engage with your site. It helps you to increase conversions and better user engagement on your website.
Pricing:
It provides 30-day free trial on all plans. Paid plans are on annual basis.
- Basic($9/month)
- Standard($19/month)
- Plus($49/month)
- Pro($99/month)
Conclusion:
Since team collaboration is an integral part of web design, it has become necessary to implement the design feedback and collaboration tools that would connect your team members working in remote areas and maintain the workflow efficiently.
The criteria for picking these tools is that the tool should have features for design collaboration but also be useful in a web design process. Each team has a different process and one tool is not fit for all.
You need to choose the tool for your agile processes that fits the process and is easy to use for all the team members.
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