25 great free UX tools
There might be no such thing as a free lunch but thanks to the wonders of Open Source software, freeware and trial software there most certainly is such a thing as free software. In this article I list 25 great free UX tools, including tools to help with prototyping, annotating, screen grabbing, site mapping, usability testing, accessibility and analytics. For even more freebies also take a look at 25 more great free UX tools, that’s a whopping 50 in total!
Prototyping tools
Pencil
Pencil is a nice little Open Source tool for creating prototypes, UI mockups, and UX diagrams, such as user journeys. It comes with a good set of built-in widgets covering web, windows and sketchy UI components and allows pages to be exported as HTML, a PDF, an Open Office doc, a Word Doc or an image.
http://pencil.evolus.vn
LucidChart
LucidChart is an online tool for creating diagrams, UI mockups and prototypes. It allows more than one person to collaborate on a document and comes with a nice set of built-in widgets, including UI components, icons and diagramming shapes. Although it’s not strictly speaking free it does allow documents to be created with up to 60 elements and with two collaborators for free. Documents can be saved and downloaded as a webpage, PDF or image.
http://www.lucidchart.com
Balsamiq
Balsamiq is another online UI prototyping tool and like LucidChart it’s not fee but does allow you to create simple single pages for free using the trial version (just click on the ‘take a tour’ link). It has an intuitive UI and comes with a good set of sketchy widgets to use. Pages can be downloaded as a PDF or an image.
http://balsamiq.com
Serena Prototype Composer
Serena Prototype Composer is a powerful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) UI editor, allowing you to create UI prototypes and mockups, and to link these in with user flows and business process diagrams. Unfortunately the free edition (community edition) only allows you to modify some existing sample projects.
http://www.serena.com/products/prototype-composer/
Annotation tools
Protonotes
Protonotes is a great little tool that allows you to add post-it type notes to a prototype in order to capture feedback. You simply add a little bit of JavaScript to each page of the prototype and Protonotes does the rest.
http://www.protonotes.com
WebNotes
WebNotes is a browser plugin that allows you to attach notes and comments to any webpage, and to share these with other people. It’s a great tool for capturing feedback for a design and for capturing comments for things like usability reviews and competitor benchmarks.
http://www.webnotes.net
Diigo
Diigo allows you to capture and share annotations for webpages, including screenshots, comments and highlighted text. You can set-up a group for sharing information so it’s a nice tool for capturing comments for designs and for sharing things like design patterns.
http://www.diigo.com
Design tools
Lorem Ipsum generator
The Lorem Ipsum generator does what it says on the tin and is really useful for generating dummy text for designs. You can generate Lorem Ipsum for a specific number of paragraphs, words or sentences.
http://www.ipsum-generator.com
ColorPic
ColorPic is a great little tool for those instances when you want to grab an onscreen colour. A magnifier makes grabbing the right pixel dead easy and it will give you the web colour along with Hex and RGB values. ColorPic even allows you to build up palettes of colours so you don’t have to keep grabbing the same colours.
http://www.iconico.com/colorpic
Netvibes
Netvibes allows you to set-up custom dashboards to track online content such as blogs, RSS feeds and photo feeds. It’s useful for keeping in touch with what’s going on with your favourite UX websites and for getting inspiration for new designs.
http://www.netvibes.com
Screen grab tools
Jing
Jing allows you to easily capture and share screen grabs and videos from onscreen. It’s great for capturing dynamic interactions and behaviours and allows you to export videos as a streaming Flash video (SWF) that anyone can play in their browser.
http://www.techsmith.com/jing/free/
Screengrab! Firefox plugin
Screengrab! is a great little Firefox plugin that allows you to capture an entire webpage, not just the visible part. Screen captures can be saved as JPG or PNG images, or alternatively can be copied directly to the clipboard.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/screengrab/
Browsershots
Browsershots is a free Open Source web app that allows you to find out how a webpage will look in lots of different browsers. It gives you screenshots for each browser and along with the usual suspects such as IE, Firefox and Chrome it also includes some really obscure ones, such as SeaMonkey, Konqueror and Galeon.
http://browsershots.org
Sitemapping tools
XMind
XMind is a really nice mind mapping tool that’s great for building site maps; for collating information; and for generally capturing thoughts and feedback. Mind maps can be imported from other mind mapping applications such as MindManger and Freemind and can be exported or shared with others by uploading them to the XMind website.
http://www.xmind.net
Freemind
Freemind is an Open Source mind mapping tool that’s really useful for creating clickable HTML sitemaps. It’s not as slick as some of the other mind mapping tools out there but is very quick to use and has more features than the free edition of XMind.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net
Usability testing tools
CamStudio
CamStudio is an Open Source application that allows you to record what’s going on onscreen, including audio from a microphone or the computer speakers. It even allows you to capture a webcam video feed as well so it’s a great tool for recording usability testing sessions. Videos are saved as AVI files and can also be converted into streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
http://camstudio.org
Remote usability tools
Skype
The business version of Skype allows you to carry out screen sharing with an audio and even a video feed, so it’s perfect for carrying out remote usability testing. Unfortunately participants do need to install the Skype client on their computer and it won’t record sessions like WebEx, but then you can always use something like CamStudio to do this.
http://www.skype.com
Loop11
Loop11 is a great tool for carrying out unmoderated usability testing. You basically set-up some tasks for people to do on a website and let them try them out at their own convenience. Loop11 is not free but does allow you to set-up a trial test with a maximum of 5 tasks and 2 questions.
http://www.loop11.com
Five Second Test
Five second test is a great tool for capturing first impressions for a design, or for perhaps carrying out some quick A/B testing. You can have one or more designs, in the form of images and then people are able to view them for 5 seconds before entering some feedback.
http://www.fivesecondtest.com
Survey Monkey
SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool that’s great for carrying out online surveys, or for capturing feedback following usability testing. The free version allows you to set-up surveys with up to10 questions and 100 responses, which is generally plenty.
http://www.surveymonkey.com
Usability reviewing tools
Concept feedback
Concept Feedback is an interesting tool for getting second opinions on a design. You can post a design to the site and then a community of designers will give you their feedback for free. Unfortunately Concept feedback is no longer running (as of March 2016), but take a look at this article outlining a few alternatives to concept feedback.
http://www.conceptfeedback.com
Analytics tools
Google analytics
Google analytics is not only free but also incredibly useful for finding out how a site is being used. You can find out loads of interesting stuff such as the paths visitors are commonly taking and where visitors are entering and exiting a site. It even allows you to carry out A/B testing.
http://www.google.com/analytics
ClickHeat
ClickHeat is a tool that allows you to view a visual heatmap of clicks on a web page, showing hot (lots of clicks) and cold (few clicks) zones. It’s great for finding out where visitors are clicking on pages, although it does require a bit of technical know how to get it installed and working for a site.
http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat
Accessibility tools
Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar
The Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar is a Firefox plugin that’s really useful for checking the accessibility of web pages.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/accessibility-evaluation-toolb
Total Validator
Total Validator is an (X)HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spell checker, and a broken links checker all rolled into one.
http://www.totalvalidator.com
27th February 2011 @ 12:29 am
Hi Neil, thanks for a great list, I use Screengrab all the time myself.
If you don’t mind I might also pitch our UX services here since both have free versions available:
Wirify lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click, and Wirify Pro lets you export these wireframes as fully editable OmniGraffle documents.
Naview helps you create easier navigations through prototyping and testing.
I hope your readers will find these useful.
28th February 2011 @ 12:53 pm
I’d like to add Justinmind to your list as it offers a free service (in Beta) to share your wireframes and prototypes online and it even integrates most user testing tools (Loop11, UserZoom, Google Analytics…).
http://www.justinmind.com
@just_in_mind
1st March 2011 @ 5:46 pm
Great post, with some fantastic tools I already use, and many new ones I plan to soon. Thanks!
23rd March 2011 @ 12:47 am
Great list.
Thank you guys
20th May 2011 @ 3:33 pm
Really nice list. Don’t forget Crazy Egg – Great heatmaps 🙂
24th November 2011 @ 3:28 pm
WireframeSketcher is another rapid wireframing and prototyping tool. It’s a commercial tool. It’s cross-platform with fast and native UI. A few highlights: features clean and sketchy themes; exports beautiful PDFs; lets you create click-through prototypes and visualize screen flows; has stencils for Android, iPhone and iPad. Take a look a it: http://wireframesketcher.com
28th May 2012 @ 12:24 am
Another great tool that is brand new – http://www.storyboardthat.com. Rapidly create storyboards to get development and marketing on the same page
21st August 2012 @ 12:10 am
IntuitionHQ.com is a very easy usability tool. Has a free plan.
30th August 2012 @ 2:08 pm
Great information source thank you
11th October 2012 @ 12:48 pm
Hi
this is a great list. I have a Win/Mac app Story Turbo
http://www.storyturbo.com
which is a fast zooming interface that allows images and text boxes to be placed anywhere.
So screen shots of web sites (or anything else, paper/pencil scans, photos etc) can be added, and any number of comments, notes and ideas can also be added; arrows too; all can be colored, dragged about, whatever you want. Share files. Is free form so very flexible. (Web app, ipad, soon).
Comments welcome as is personal project, thanks.
22nd January 2014 @ 9:59 am
Could you please add http://creaetly.com to your list. its a online diagramming software with collaboration