UX solution enables organizations to recognize areas of improvement for their products, predominantly in the ease of use area, from the perspective of their customers. UX design tools facilitates and simplifies the process that design teams use to make products that deliver meaningful and appropriate experiences to users. This includes the design of the complete process of obtaining and integrating the product, comprising features of branding, design, usability and function. Through all the phases of the UX design process designers make use of best UX software in order to be able to create high quality digital or physical representations of their notions. Best UX software may also refer to technologies that are used in applying design philosophies in prototyping or just recording ideas. At a basic level, UX design tools act as markers, post-its and whiteboards that the teams make use of during brainstorming meetings. Likewise, designers make use of physical UX tools when they do paper prototyping. At more advanced levels, best UX Software act as the software that can be leveraged by designers to progress their and their team’s ideas right from free to premium selections.

Best UX Software in 2020

1. Adobe XD
2. Balsamiq Wireframes
3. UserTesting
4. Affinity Designer
5. Smartlook UX tools
6. Dovetail UX tools
7. Userpilot
8. UXPressia
9. ContentSquare
10. Matomo Analytics

Adobe XD – Adobe XD UX tools has been created for businesses of all sizes. It helps businesses with content design by delivering features that include auto animation, responsive resize, repeat grid, and more. The software enables users to link artboards, increase animations, generate micro-interactions and run parallax effects just with a single click….Read more

Balsamiq Wireframes – This is a rapid wireframing software that allows lean teams to work together, create mock-ups, control versions, and perform user testing. The company focuses on the ideation stage, provides users with an effective tool that enables them to focus more on the structure instead of colours and icons. It also delivers sufficient interactivity to substitute prototypes most of the time, and makes it simple to work together and get response on the wireframes….Read more

UserTesting - UserTesting software has been powered by human insights and it enables businesses of all sizes to deliver the best customer experience. With the help of UserTestings on-demand human insights solution, organizations across various industries make precise customer centric decisions at all levels, as per the business demands. With UserTesting software, product teams, sellers, digital and customer experience professionals can assertively and instantly create the most appropriate experiences for all target customers, growing brand loyalty and revenue….Read more

Affinity Designer – Affinity Designer is a responsive graphic design solution that can be used for managing UI projects. The software allows designers to pan and zoom at 60fps, offers live gradients, effects and modification options, and allows them to view real time blend mode previews…Read more

Smartlook - Smartlook offers a qualitative analytics solution through web and mobile channels and helps number of businesses of all proportions and industries. The software helps businesses to monitor user behaviour, trends, and bugs in great detail all of which helps them in making better data-driven decisions. Businesses can also understand more about how people use their app, identify where they struggle and pinpoint problems in conversions….Read more

Dovetail - With the help of Dovetail software, researchers, designers, and product managers can store all the user research data in a single location, assess qualitative data to determine patterns and insights, and share research outcomes with the rest of the company. The software comes equipped with a rich text collaborative editor, inline tagging, and many other features that deliver a great user experience, and a high-class support. Dovetail is cloud research software you'll want to use, all for an affordable price….Read more

Userpilot - Userpilot helps product, user experience and customer success professionals in improving user acceptance with the help of behaviour driven product experiences. The software enables businesses to create personalized experiences on top of their product. Businesses can instantly improve their on boarding for new signups, activate collaborative tips when it's pertinent and help users comprehend the value, without any coding. Userpilot software also helps businesses increase user retention…. Read more

UXPressia - UXPressia offers an online tool that helps with mapping customer journeys, creating personas and impact maps. The software provides an ideal balance amongst sticker and table-based solutions with a spontaneous drag and drop functionality and ample customizable features. With UXPressia software, businesses can create and provide an excellent experience to their customers. It allows users to visualize their customer journeys, assess touchpoints in multi-channel exchanges and invite co-workers to map together and share journeys online…. Read more

ContentSquare - Contentsquare allows businesses to create better digital experiences for their customers. ContentSquare’s Digital Experience Analytics Platform monitors and visualises a huge number of digital behaviours, provides smart references that businesses can leverage to grow their revenue, improve customer loyalty and drive innovation. With offices in UK, USA, Europe and Asia, the company currently enables more than 600 organizations to provide improved digital experiences for their customers….Read more

Matomo Analytics - Matomo software is the one of the best open-source web analytics solution that is currently used widely on a huge number of websites in over 190 countries. Matomo focuses a lot on privacy protection, complete data possession and allows no data sampling. The company provides two different hosting options - cloud and on premise. The cloud version removes the trouble out of installation, while the on premise version is free of cost, open-source and self-hosted PHP/MySQL software that can be installed on the businesses’ server….Read more

What are the factors that are driving the UX solutions market?

Growing need to deliver better customer experience

As businesses start to adopt digitization, the population of agents that interact with an enterprise grows to include not only its internal and external customers but also its interactions with its short and its long-term partners and suppliers (including its competition). It helps the agents to understand the quality of those interactions which helps organizations to shape the overall perceptions of an enterprise. These digital agents also engage themselves with applications and services, while simultaneously linked with the social media-enabled community to understand the interactions which can influence the overall community in a more effective manner thereby providing a better end user experience.

Growing need to assess business impact of end user experience

Traditionally, CIOs, IT Directors, IT Managers, and network architects had been the types of job roles that were being tasked for providing and ensuring seamless delivery of IT infrastructure and business services. However, with the digitization of businesses, business owners and partners are becoming increasingly interested in learning about how the delivery of business-critical data impacts their organizations' bottom lines. Business executives are not interested in performance metrics that show how IT infrastructure is performing, but rather they are focused on translating performance indicators such as application availability and time in failures into business parameters, like customer delight, employee performance, cost savings, and brand recognition.

Ever changing user expectations

With the increasing adoption of EUEM products, the market for Application Performance Management (APM) technologies is changing and becoming more complex. As internet penetration goes deeper on increasing with high-speed data and availability globally, end users are expecting the same levels of the application performance for data that they access at work as they experience for data that they use for their own purposes. To provide a better user experience, organizations are deploying new applications that use better infrastructure and do not cause disruption of key business processes.

What are the future opportunities for UX tools providers?

Growth in data driven decision making and predictive analytics

In the age of machine-centric and data-centric approach, the rising adoption of cloud and smart technologies directed enterprises to opt for advanced analytics for managing their operational data, such as IT services, infrastructure, and network management and maintenance. The rising amount of operational data is increasing the complexity in monitoring and management of enterprise applications and IT infrastructure. So, to improve the operational efficiencies, predictive analytics plays a vital role, analytics and analytics applications are leveraged for streamlining the business operations of enterprises. On the other hand, the rising complexity of data and IT operations requires pro-active and reliable synthetic monitoring solutions, which can monitor complex infrastructure operations including servers, databases, application servers, and composite applications, providing an opportunity for service providers to offer reliable monitoring solutions to their commercial customers. In addition, application performance monitoring and management systems use algorithms to monitor and manage the application behaviour with users. It also helps in making data-driven decision-making leveraging advanced analytics solutions, thereby improving the enterprises business operations and helping to boost their revenue growth.

Developments in application delivery

Application delivery solutions help enterprises in improving the visibility, availability, and security of their crucial enterprise applications, with advanced performance monitoring and management platform, thereby accelerating the application performance. A traditional application delivery platform may store application data, but the data was not available to the enterprises in real time and was inadequate for real-time monitoring, analysis, and performance management of hosted applications. With the advancements in application delivery, it offers a comprehensive set of capabilities and services, such as application performance monitoring and management, traffic management, application security, and application analytics supporting all cloud deployment types, such as private, public, and hybrid. SDN helps enterprises and communication service providers to accelerate the time to deliver new applications and service, assuring the application performance at required benchmark and SLAs. Furthermore, the evolving software-defined technology offers visibility into application, network, and infrastructure performance, thereby forced enterprises to adopt SDN monitoring, giving a comprehensive opportunity to the synthetic application monitoring solution providers, to offer reliable SDN monitoring to their commercial clients.

What are the challenges faced by businesses operating in the UX tools market?

Lack of advanced application performance monitoring analytics

Effective strategies for proactively managing application performance issues call for next-generation analytics that enables organizations to perform "what-if" analyses and to automatically detect performance anomalies. Not having these types of capabilities in application performance monitoring at first place makes it more difficult to identify problems early and resolve them before they impact business users. Also, enterprises are facing a major challenge of lack of reliable real-time and pro-active application monitoring and visibility in the overall application performance and availability. As the traditional enterprise software and tools are not able to provide a complete analysis of application health, performance, load balancing of application usage traffic, capacity analysis, and many others. As organizations move toward hybrid and converged compute environments, it becomes challenging for the enterprises to provide complete visibility across internal and external resources. So, they need enhanced monitoring and management tools that provide a single pane of 360-degree view across all applications hosted.

Lack of skill set and expertise

The biggest challenge in the UX design tools market is the availability of skilled labour and expertise. It could hamper the enterprise’s ability to deliver application performance monitoring and meet the evolving needs of commercial customers. Many enterprises hire application monitoring and security professionals who lack the right skill to visualize, analyse, and identify the advanced vulnerabilities in application performance. They cannot diagnose the problem or outage in the application performance and availability exactly. However, this challenge can be overcome by offering several types of monitoring training and management training to the professionals to give them good exposure for building organization’s secure IT infrastructure, and to offer reliable and superior end user experience to application users and commercial customers.

Adobe XD, Balsamiq Wireframes and Affinity Designer have been identified as
Visionary leaders in the UX tools market. 

Dovetail, UXPressia, and UserPilot have been identified as Dynamic Differentiators in the UX tools market. 

UserTesting, and Smartlook have been identified as Innovators in the UX tools market. 

ContentSquare and Matomo Analytics have been identified as Emerging companies in the UX tools market. 

What are the most important features of a UX solution?

UX analytics and event-tracking

UX analytics and event-tracking help user researchers to learn in detail about their website visitor activities on their website. This kind of information can prove to be very valuable since it allows designers to instantly decide if a specific design change will be beneficial prior to the implementation of the website. One of the most popular software that offers UX analytics is Google Analytics.

Session recording and heatmapping

This is also a method that is mostly used for quantitative research. With this functionality, users can track whole sessions, including complete recordings of the way the users navigate on the website or app. Also, designers can identify patterns by making use of heatmapping at page level to track how users communicate with the page.

A/B and split testing

A/B testing and split testing are user testing methods that are typically used to understand the differences of a web page have the maximum success rates with the website visitors. With A/B testing, designers can compare two different versions of a web page, content or a component on the page. This type of testing allows designers to identify the version that is more constant with the goals that have been set. The goal can be anything from improving sales, to dropping the bounce rate or improving the conversion rate.

Visual/Usability Feedback

Visual feedback feature is also called as usability feedback. This feature helps marketers and other user experience experts to increase page usability by taking inputs from their users. With the help of this feature, users can point to exact page components and offer response on those page components. Once a component is chosen, the tool keeps a screenshot with the user’s response.

Design and wireframing

Design and wireframing helps users in creating new designs and creating ideas for funnels, landing pages, etc. These kinds of tools help in the communication of concepts throughout the development process as they deliver a visual picture of the design and lead to rapid prototyping.

What are the kinds of services provided by UX tools providers?

With the increasing adoption of Best UX Software products, the demand for supporting services is also increasing among end users. The UX tools market by service is made up of professional services and managed services. The professional services segment includes consulting services, integration and deployment services, and training and support services. As most end users lack the technical expertise to manage the best UX software products, professional service providers help them overcome this problem. Managed services are the services offered by third-party providers to manage the operational challenges of enterprises. These services help in minimizing expenses, increasing total revenue, and improving performance.

Professional Services

Professional services are mostly post-sales services, which are delivered to customers after purchase of products. These customized, knowledge-based services, which are being offered to clients, fall under professional services. These services constitute an integral part in deploying best UX software products on board, imparting training, and handling and maintaining the UX design tools products. They include designing, planning, upgrading, and a host of consulting services. Companies offering these services encompass consultants, product experts, and dedicated project management teams, which specialize in designing and delivering robust systems.

Managed Services

Managed services are the services provided by third parties to run and manage IT operations and infrastructure of organizations as per service level agreements. Managed service providers take whole responsibility of customers’ needs and deliver optimum services. From the digital process automation standpoint, the managed service providers run the automation product or framework for helping enterprises reach their business goals. Managed services allow oeganizations to focus on their key competencies, rather than on implementing and managing the digital process automation framework. This offers various benefits, including reduced operational cost and improved operational efficiency.

What are different options to deploy UX tools?

This chapter includes the segmentation of the best UX software market on the basis of deployment types, such as on-premises and cloud. The on-premises deployment type holds a larger market size, as organizations prefer to keep their data on-premises, while the cloud deployment type is expected to hold a higher CAGR during the forecast period, due to the emergence of advanced technologies. Furthermore, vendors are focusing on cloud-based products; therefore, the cloud deployment type is expected to witness growth in the near future.

On Premises

The on-premises deployment involves the deployment of software and hardware at clients’ premises. It is an expensive model as compared to the cloud model. It the traditional approach of implementing any software in enterprises. The products that are installed and run over computer systems deployed on-premises in organizations, instead of the hosted facility, such as cloud are referred to as on-premises products. On-premises products can be accessed directly by end users, due to their physical presence in organizations. With advanced technologies, cloud vendors operating in the market are developing new advanced products that are affecting the conventional on-premises deployment market space. Furthermore, the rising cost associated with the maintenance of on-premises infrastructure may restrain the market. Organizations wherein user credentials are critical for business operations prefer the on-premises deployment model, as they can control their own systems. The government and public sector, and BFSI verticals would prefer on-premises UX products, because these verticals deal with the critical and sensitive data related to national security and financial transactions.

Cloud Based

In the cloud deployment model, best UX software products are deployed on a public or private cloud located remotely. The cloud deployment type is expected to grow at a higher CAGR in the best UX software market. Implementing cloud-based products and services helps SMEs and large enterprises focus on their core competencies, rather than IT processes. Furthermore, these products and services reduce IT budgets, as they only require the internet connection. With the help of cloud-based best UX software products and services, organizations can avoid the costs related to software, hardware, storage, and technical staff. For organizations that have limited budgets, the cloud-based UX design tools products are a good option, because of their speed and scalability. The cloud-based implementation model also offers a scalable service by providing on-demand data governance. This service allows clients to pay according to their utilization of services. Globally, large enterprises and SMEs are shifting toward cloud-based UX software products to streamline their processes easily and minimize upfront costs.

Which verticals make the most use of best UX Software?

Verticals, such as IT and telecommunications, government and public sector, BFSI, healthcare and life sciences, and retail and consumer goods make the most use of the best UX software. In the application-driven market space, a good end user experience proves to be a differentiator. Many enterprises are undertaking digital transformation projects for providing their customers with a good digital experience. This factor has further increased the adoption of UX design tools products and services among the enterprises in different verticals.

Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance

The BFSI vertical collectively includes organizations that are into banking services, such as core banking, corporate, retail, investment, private, and cards. Financial services include payment gateways, stock broking, and mutual funds, whereas insurance services cover both life and general insurance policies. The entry of FinTech companies in the market has caused a lot of disruption in this vertical. To keep up with these disruptions, traditional banking companies are digitalizing their services. In the app-driven market space, the increasing number of customers are accessing banking and other related services with the help of their mobile phones; hence, the companies in this vertical are under immense pressure to roll out their services online at a fast pace and offer the best possible end user experience. A negative user experience while using any of the online banking service can hamper customer satisfaction. As the organizations in this vertical are becoming customer-centric, they have started giving more emphasis on the end user experience, which in turn, has increased the adoption of UX tools products and services.

IT and Telecommunications

IT and telecommunications is the most significant vertical in the best UX software market. Telecom organizations are always curious to capitalize on digitalization opportunities. The enterprises in this vertical are transforming their older applications to enhance the end user experience. Moreover, the growing number of subscribers and increasing adoption of various technologies related to media and digital content are creating the need to optimize resources for fulfilling customer demands in a timely manner. The rapid advancements in cloud computing and IoT have helped telcos leverage the benefits of their existing infrastructure for complementing these technologies. The software systems needed in this vertical need to be highly robust and reliable, as their failure can lead to a negative end user experience and subsequently revenue loss. This vertical has seen a large scale adoption of UX tools to counter problems, such as customer churn, and offer the best possible end user experience to its customers.

Government and Public Sector

Various government departments across the globe are undertaking initiatives, such as smart governance, for providing online services to their citizens. With developed IT infrastructure in place, government and public organizations are shifting to the digital mode of operations for improving reliability and efficiency. They have to ensure that they provide all the services to their citizens in the least possible time, and preserve capital and resources for solving customer grievances. Hence, these organizations are using best UX software products and services to make sure that the best possible experience is delivered to their citizens. Making the use of best UX software products has helped various government departments across the globe to deliver a true digital experience across a number of online services to their citizens, enhance end-user satisfaction, and improve overall citizen engagement.

Retail and Consumer Goods

The retail and consumer goods sector is one of the fastest-growing sectors, due to the increasing consumer buying power. With the propagation of online market places, sellers are implementing ground-breaking technologies, such as cloud computing, big data analytics, digital stores, and social media networks In this day and age of apps, shoppers prefer to shop online through apps. With the ever-increasing competition in this vertical, the end user experience proves to be a vital differentiating factor among a variety of online shopping options. Online retailers lose out on their users because of negative customer experience. There is a large scale adoption of best UX software products in the retail vertical, as these products help organizations in analysing application performance metrics, assessing agreements to service level objectives across organizations, and addressing critical failures that can lead to bad customer experiences.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

The healthcare and life sciences vertical comprises hospitals, health clinics, medical and dental practices, healthcare equipment and services, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology, and related life sciences organizations. The increasing adoption of business applications in this vertical has assisted enterprises in smoothening their business processes and improving operational efficiencies. The enterprises in this vertical are also implementing and adopting new technologies to provide better services to patients. The implementation of IT infrastructure in the healthcare vertical helps manage the health information in computerized systems. These systems need to be strong and robust, as their failure can lead to the loss of patient information or worse. Creating and maintaining a positive end user experience are challenges for health care organizations, wherein access to clinical applications is critical, to ensure the delivery of quality services . Best UX software products and other supporting products can ensure quality health care services that help in having real-time visibility over healthcare applications and equipment present in healthcare facilities. These factors can further help in resolving potential issues or failures that might occur.

Others

The other verticals taken into the consideration for this market study are manufacturing, travel and hospitality, and media and entertainment. The manufacturing vertical relies heavily on a network of collaborators, as manufacturers need to regularly share and update the information related to raw materials, processing, engineering, designing, and production with stakeholders. There is a need for a strong and robust software system to support all manufacturing functions. The recent advancements in cloud computing, Machine-2-Machine Communication (M2M), and IoT have led to the modernization of IT infrastructure in the manufacturing vertical. These technologies have given a rise to advanced control dashboards, predictive maintenance algorithms, and mobile applications for helping the general operations and other support functions in the manufacturing vertical. A good end user experience is crucial while using the applications in the manufacturing vertical, as the efficiency of manufacturing processes is dependent on the performance of these applications. A slow and unresponsive application can lead to delays in production. Hence, best UX software products are being adopted in the manufacturing vertical. The travel and hospitality is a vertical wherein the user experience plays a critical role. This vertical has seen huge growth in the recent years, due to the rising buying power of consumers. There has been an influx of online travel and hospitality websites, and applications which aim at delivering the best travel experience to their customers. Various travel aspects, such as flight, train, bus, and hotel bookings are covered in this vertical. A negative end user experience can lead to consumers switching to a competitive website or application for fulfilling their requirements or needs. Hence, the best UX software products are being adopted at a rapid pace in this vertical. The media and entertainment vertical is a vast vertical that manages enormous volumes of digital data across its function and faces tough challenges in terms of time and cost. The advancements in cloud infrastructure and rise of Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have led to the entry of a large number of online content providers. To keep up with these disruptions, traditional media houses are undertaking digital transformation projects. Due to the rising pressure to deliver a good end user experience to customers, many media companies in this vertical have started adopting the best UX software products.