The UX Designer Toolkit: 11 Tools From Research to Testing

A UX designer's work moves through a few recurring stages, and each stage has its own typical tools. To understand users, teams run interviews in Dovetail, send short surveys with Typeform and analyze existing and public feedback with Kimola. To shape structure and flows, they map ideas in Miro and test navigation with Optimal. Wireframes start in Balsamiq and designs and prototypes are built in Figma. Prototypes are tested with users in Maze or Lyssna, behavior on the live product is studied in Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar), and decisions are documented in Notion.

Few designers need all eleven. Most start with Figma and one testing tool, then add research, information architecture and analytics tools as the product and the team grow. This guide is meant as a map of the work, so you can see which tool covers which job and where they connect.

This guide is written by the Kimola team. Kimola is our product, so we explain where it fits and where it doesn't, and we describe every other tool based on its public documentation.

What UX Designers Need From Their Tools

UX design, short for user experience design, is the work of making a product easy and useful for the people who rely on it. In practice, a UX designer learns who the users are and where they struggle, organizes content and flows so people can find what they need, turns those decisions into wireframes and prototypes, tests them with real users, and checks what happens once the design is live.

No single tool covers all of that, and the most useful toolkits are the ones where each stage feeds the next. Research should tell you which flows to redesign, prototypes should be easy to put in front of test participants, and what you learn from tests and live behavior should end up somewhere the whole team can find it. When those links are missing, designers spend their time moving files between tools instead of improving the product.

How We Chose These Tools

We included a tool only if it is a primary tool for at least one stage of a UX designer's work and is widely used by design and research teams. We looked at what each tool does at that stage, how it connects to the others, especially to Figma, whether it can be evaluated on a free plan or trial, and whether its pricing is published. Pricing for each tool comes from its own pricing page.

We left out general productivity tools, such as presentation, graphics and screen recording tools, and roadmap and project management tools. Designers use them, but they are not what makes a UX toolkit different. Our product manager toolkit covers the planning side.

Research and Discovery

Dovetail

Dovetail is built for qualitative research such as interviews and usability tests. UX teams use it to store recordings and transcripts of user sessions, tag what people say, and turn those tags into shared insights that designers, product managers and engineers can search. Dovetail now describes itself as a customer intelligence platform and also brings in sales calls, support cases and app reviews, with AI summaries and chat across that material.

Dovetail fits designers and researchers who run regular interviews and want a single place where the team's research lives. It is strongest when the evidence comes from conversations the team has had itself. Teams whose main source is thousands of reviews or survey comments may need a tool designed to analyze feedback at that scale.

Pricing: Dovetail has a free plan with one channel and one project. The Enterprise plan is priced on request.

Typeform

Typeform is a form and survey builder known for its one-question-at-a-time format. UX teams use it for screener surveys that find the right participants for interviews and tests, and for short surveys that ask users about a task or a recent change. Logic, hidden fields and integrations with tools such as Google Sheets and Slack let a survey route people and send answers where the team works.

Typeform fits designers who need well-designed surveys without help from engineering. It is built for collecting answers rather than analyzing them at depth, so teams that gather a large volume of open-ended responses usually need a separate step to make sense of the text.

Pricing: Typeform has a free plan. Paid plans are priced by monthly responses and seats, and current rates are listed on Typeform's pricing page.

Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. Design teams analyze the feedback they already have, such as app reviews, support tickets, survey responses and call transcripts, or collect public reviews by pasting a link. Where a usability test shows how a handful of participants complete one flow, Kimola shows which problems come up most across thousands of comments, which helps a designer decide what to research and test next.

Much of the most useful UX evidence is already public. By pasting a link to an App Store, Google Play, Amazon or Trustpilot page, a designer can collect and analyze the reviews on that page, including the pages of competing products. Before redesigning an onboarding flow, for example, you can check whether users of a competing app complain about theirs and what exactly they find confusing, without recruiting anyone.

Kimola finds themes in the data itself, without predefined labels, and gives each theme mentioned in a comment its own sentiment, which is known as aspect-based sentiment. A review that likes the new look but cannot find the settings menu counts as positive for design and negative for navigation. Kimola also asks every comment research questions called Dimensions. For UX designers, the most useful are Pain Points, Unmet Needs and Experience Stages, which show where in the user journey a problem appears, from discovery and purchase to everyday use and support.

If your file has columns such as platform, app version or customer segment, Kimola compares every theme across them and over time, and only statistically significant differences become Signals. If navigation complaints rise only on iOS after a redesign ships, that appears as a Signal; a difference that could be chance does not. Scores are deterministic, so the same data always produces the same ranking, and they account for how many comments a theme has: a theme with 43 positive comments out of 50 ranks above one with 5 out of 5. The same method works after a launch, when you want to know how users are reacting to a new design.

Kimola is not a design or prototyping tool. It does not run usability tests, recruit participants, conduct interviews or send surveys, and it does not produce behavioral data such as clicks, task success or time on task. It analyzes the feedback that the other tools in this list collect, and the feedback that already exists online. The free Starter plan is limited to 150 queries per month.

Pricing: Kimola has a free Starter plan with no credit card required. Paid plans start at $49 per month, and pricing is public. Larger organizations work with an account manager on the Enterprise plan.

Kimola fits design and research teams that have more feedback than they can read, or want to learn from competitors' users, and need to know which problems matter most and why. You can read more about how product teams use Kimola.

Information Architecture and Mapping

Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard. UX teams use it for user journey maps, personas, user flows, affinity mapping of research notes and design workshops, and its templates cover most common UX exercises. Because everyone can work on the same board at once, it suits remote teams and sessions with stakeholders outside design.

Miro fits teams that think and plan visually across disciplines. Teams that already work in Figma can do much of the same in FigJam, Figma's own whiteboard, so it is worth checking whether a separate tool is needed. A board is a good place to explore, but final decisions usually need to move into a design file or a document.

Pricing: Miro has a free plan with three editable boards. Starter costs $8 and Business $20 per member per month on annual billing, and Enterprise is priced on request for 30 members or more.

Optimal

Optimal, previously known as Optimal Workshop, is a user research platform with a long history in information architecture testing. Its card sorting shows how users group content, tree testing checks whether they can find items in a proposed navigation, and first-click testing shows where they expect to start a task. The platform also covers prototype testing, live site testing, surveys and interviews, with AI features that identify themes and pull out quotes.

Optimal fits designers working on navigation, menus and content structure, especially for content-heavy websites and apps. Its Starter plan is counted in studies per year, so teams that launch many small tests may need more studies or an Enterprise plan. There is a free trial but no ongoing free plan.

Pricing: The Starter plan is $199 per month, billed annually, and includes five studies per year with unlimited seats and responses. Enterprise pricing is custom.

Wireframing and Prototyping

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is a low-fidelity wireframing tool. Its sketch-style components look deliberately unfinished, which keeps early conversations about structure and flow rather than colors and fonts. Wireframes can be linked into simple clickable prototypes, and Balsamiq AI can generate wireframes from a description, using a monthly allowance of AI credits.

Balsamiq fits the earliest stage of design and teams where non-designers, such as product managers or founders, sketch ideas themselves. It is not built for high-fidelity design or detailed interaction, so most teams move to Figma once a direction is agreed.

Pricing: Balsamiq Cloud is priced per editor and billed annually: Starter costs $16 per month for up to 10 projects, Teams $24 for up to 100 projects and Enterprise $35 for up to 400 projects. Reviewers are free on every plan, and a 14-day free trial requires no credit card.

Figma

Figma is the most widely used design and prototyping platform. Designers create interfaces, components and design systems in Figma Design, link screens into interactive prototypes, and hand designs to developers through Dev Mode. FigJam covers whiteboarding, and Figma Make generates working prototypes from a prompt, which helps when an idea needs to be tested before it is fully designed.

For most UX designers, Figma is the center of the toolkit, and many of the other tools in this list import Figma prototypes directly. Figma prices by seat type, so designers need a Full seat while developers and reviewers can often use cheaper Dev or Collab seats. Its prototypes show how a design should behave, but they do not measure how users actually perform with it, which is what testing tools are for.

Pricing: Figma has a free Starter plan. On the Professional plan, a Full seat costs $16, a Dev seat $12 and a Collab seat $3 per month. Organization and Enterprise plans are billed annually.

Usability Testing

Maze

Maze describes itself as a user research platform that brings recruiting, testing and analysis together. Designers import Figma prototypes and run unmoderated tests, add surveys, card sorts and tree tests, and get automated reports with success rates, paths and heatmaps. On larger plans it also covers live website and mobile app testing, moderated interviews and AI-moderated interviews, with a panel of more than 7 million participants.

Maze fits design teams that test Figma prototypes often and want results quickly. Its plan structure matters for evaluation: there is a Free plan and an Enterprise plan, with no self-service paid plan between them, and live site testing and interviews are part of Enterprise.

Pricing: Maze has a Free plan with one study per month and five seats. The Enterprise plan has custom pricing. Our Maze alternatives guide compares other testing tools in more detail.

Lyssna

Lyssna is a user research and usability testing platform that covers most of the methods Maze does. It supports prototype testing, live website testing, first-click tests, five-second tests, preference tests, card sorting, tree testing, surveys, recordings and user interviews. Its research panel lists more than 690,000 participants, and teams can also recruit their own users.

Lyssna fits designers who want quick, frequent design checks with a self-service paid plan and published pricing. Panel responses are priced separately on every plan, so teams that rely on the panel should budget for participants in addition to the subscription.

Pricing: Lyssna has a Free plan with three seats and 15 self-recruited responses. The Growth plan is listed at $166 per month, and Enterprise pricing is available from sales.

Behavior Analytics

Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar)

Hotjar, the heatmap and session recording tool, merged into the Contentsquare Group on July 1, 2025, and new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. Hotjar's heatmaps, recordings and surveys now live inside Contentsquare, an experience analytics platform.

Contentsquare shows how users move through a live page: where they click, how far they scroll, where they hesitate and where errors interrupt them. For a designer, a few recordings of users struggling with a form often show the problem more clearly than any report, and heatmaps help check whether a redesign changed behavior. It is built for websites and web products, and it does not cover feedback that arrives through other channels, such as support tickets or app store reviews.

Pricing: Contentsquare has a free plan with 200,000 monthly sessions, one month of data access and basic surveys. The Growth plan starts at $39 per month, and the Pro and Enterprise plans are priced on request.

Documentation and Handoff

Notion

Notion is a workspace for documents, wikis and simple databases. UX teams use it to keep research plans and findings, design rationale, decision logs and handoff notes that link to Figma files and test results. On the Business plan, Notion AI includes an agent, AI meeting notes and search across connected tools.

Notion fits teams that want one flexible place for written design knowledge, so the reasons behind a design are not lost when people move on. That flexibility needs some structure from the team, or pages multiply and become hard to trust.

Pricing: Notion has a free plan. Plus costs $10 and Business $20 per member per month, and Enterprise is priced on request. Annual billing saves up to 20%.

How to Build Your UX Toolkit

Start with Figma and one testing tool. If you want a self-service paid plan, published pricing and a wide range of quick tests, Lyssna is a strong fit. If you mainly test Figma prototypes and expect to grow into enterprise research, Maze works well, starting on its Free plan. If your work centers on navigation and content structure, add Optimal for card sorting and tree testing. Balsamiq helps at the earliest stage, especially when non-designers sketch ideas.

For research, match the tool to your evidence. If you run interviews regularly and want a shared home for them, Dovetail is the stronger fit, and Typeform covers screeners and short surveys. If you have thousands of reviews, survey comments or support tickets, or want to study competitors' public reviews, and need to know which problems matter most before you test, Kimola is built for that. If your product is new and there is little feedback yet, or the comments are few enough to read in full, you may not need a dedicated analysis tool.

Once a design is live, Contentsquare shows where users struggle on the page, and Notion keeps the decisions and findings in one place. Miro supports the mapping and workshop work in between.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools do UX designers use most?

Most UX designers use Figma for design and prototyping, a testing tool such as Maze or Lyssna, and a whiteboard such as Miro or FigJam. Research tools like Dovetail, Typeform and Kimola, information architecture tools like Optimal and analytics tools like Contentsquare are added as research becomes a regular part of the work.

Is there a free UX design toolkit?

Yes, at a basic level. Figma, Miro, Maze, Lyssna, Contentsquare, Notion, Typeform and Dovetail all have free plans with limits, and Balsamiq and Optimal offer free trials. Kimola has a free Starter plan with 150 queries per month for analyzing feedback.

What is the difference between Maze and Lyssna?

Both are usability testing platforms that support prototype tests, surveys, card sorting and tree testing. Maze offers a Free plan and a custom-priced Enterprise plan, with live site testing and interviews on Enterprise. Lyssna publishes a self-service Growth plan between its Free and Enterprise plans, so smaller teams can scale up without a sales contract.

What happened to Hotjar?

Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare Group on July 1, 2025, and new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. Its heatmaps, recordings and surveys are now part of Contentsquare, which offers a free plan.

Why not just use ChatGPT to analyze user feedback?

General chat assistants work well for summarizing a small set of comments. Classifying thousands of records consistently, testing differences between segments statistically, getting the same result from the same data every time and showing the source of every number require a different kind of infrastructure, which is what dedicated feedback analysis tools provide.

Conclusion

A UX toolkit works best when each tool covers one stage of the work and passes what it learns to the next: from research to structure, from structure to prototypes, and from tests and live behavior back to the next design. Start with Figma and a testing tool, add tools when a stage becomes a bottleneck, and choose based on the evidence your team already has. If you want to see what your users' feedback says about where to focus your next design, you can start on Kimola's free Starter plan.