In the world of UI design, several great names stand out from the crowd as iconic products. CorelDraw set the stage for graphic design back in 1989, more than 20 years ago. Balsamiq literally redrew the wireframing landscape in 2008. Sketch made waves when it won the Apple Design Award two years after its release in 2010. Figma was a web-based design tool that helped accelerate the age of designing on the cloud in 2015.
Such epochal products are still giants in today’s design ecosystem, but newer players are constantly coming in to take a share of the design pie. Products such as Protopie offer a compelling choice for those who want to integrate inputs from hardware into their prototypes (keyboard, sensors, etc.) HTML5 apps like Moqups process information directly in your browser, making them more responsive than some cloud-based tools. Even Adobe complemented its Illustrator and Photoshop apps with Adobe XD specifically to address the UI design market. Such innovations are a dime a dozen, as the saying goes.
On the flip side, in such an aggressive and fast-evolving market, you have to have a very compelling product to break into the inner circle. One such newcomer that is quickly making its mark is Wondershare Mockitt, and that’s the product we’re going to look at today. It is a browser-based application that is seeing a whirlwind of feature updates and growing to become a very promising tool for both Enterprise users and individual designers due to its model of providing low-cost access to rich design and prototyping features.
Wondershare Mockitt
Wondershare Mockitt is a fast-growing UI/UX design utility that runs on your browser. Its core functionalities include prototyping, vector drawing and editing, wireframe, user flow and flow chart creation, collaborative design editing, and mind-mapping. Some of the features are still in beta or yet to be released, but the product itself is already fully functional as a design and prototyping tool on the cloud.
What Does Wondershare Mockitt Offer?
1. Prototyping Tool
The strongest feature right now is the prototyping tool (although the design tool is shaping up to be a very versatile module as well) that allows you to rapidly prototype designs that you create within Mockitt or import from Sketch. These high-fidelity prototypes help you convey your concept to the client in an appealing, crystal-clear, and tangible manner, putting everyone on the same page before you pass it on to the development team.
Rapid prototyping is essential to most SDLC models such as Agile, and Mockitt provides the perfect platform for creative iterative prototypes quickly and with a zero-learning curve. The drag-and-drop linking and easy link editing let you create highly interactive prototypes that feel like the actual final product. The advantage of creating a life-like prototype is that it helps the project’s stakeholders get a crisp virtual view of the end product that they can fully interact with. It also brings out any design flaws early on so you save money on expensive code changes in the future.
The rich asset library gives you the UI elements of your prototype, with access to additional templates, UI kits, and design systems that you can download and import into your projects. Within the library, you can also make use of dynamic widgets to define multiple states for a component. This eliminates the need to create multiple page states to show interaction in a single element. You can also assign a Master status to a widget for global editing across multiple projects and designs. These can eventually become part of your design systems, as we’ll see in the next section of this article.
2. Design Tool
The design tool is an excellent utility for vector drawing and editing. Create scalable vector graphics and pixel-perfect icons and logos with this comprehensive collection of drawing modules. Designers can stop worrying about guidelines and constraints and focus on shape, form, and color to get their creations ‘just right’ with Mockitt. Though still in its nascent stage of development, the design tool is surprisingly mature because it borrows from and builds on the best of older products that have been in the market for several years.
Real-time collaboration or co-editing is possible with the Enterprise Workspace. Simply invite other designers to your project and see who’s working on what. Zero-conflict collaborative design is what Mockitt is built for. You can have any number of people working on the same design, and the commenting tools help keep the communication lines open and flowing.
The Design System tool already has some of the elements in place, such as the Create Symbol function that allows you to begin work on your master asset library for your design system. Once the feature is fully rolled out, these assets can be associated with corresponding style guide documentation to create comprehensive design systems. The goal of Mockitt is to eventually become the go-to Enterprise tool for UI/UX design and prototyping, and it’s already made a great start.
3. Flowchart Tool
Communicating the intent behind interactions becomes easy with prototypes, but in the early stages, you need a robust flowcharting tool to create user flows that help explain the logic underlying various interactions and concepts of your design or product.
As a matter of fact, with Mockitt, you can even import your prototypes as flowcharts to make communicating their purpose much easier and more efficient. User flows tell a story better than notes and annotations, and a story is exactly what you need to convince a client to approve a particular feature or feature set.
The flowchart tool can be used with templates that you can download and customize any way you like. It gives you a head start on commonly used flow diagrams. The image import feature lets you integrate photos or images of your product into the user flow so they not only understand the process but can also visualize it.
How to Get the Most Out of Wondershare Mockitt
1. Start by Flowcharting your Idea:
Using the flowchart tool, start creating the process of how users will interact with your app or website. The tool helps you show the sequence of screens, how the user can interact with each one, the responses they receive, and the progress they make as they go from the first page until they accomplish a goal or task.
2. Prototype the App:
Using the prototype tool, start building out the screens as you envision them and link the interactive components to their page states. Edit the link to add a gesture and a transition, effect, or animation to provide feedback for the interaction and take them to the next step of the process. You can also create animation within a component or widget, so the interaction happens on the same page or screen. Define multiple states for a widget and set triggers such as hover or click.
3. Design Logos, Symbols, and Icons:
To make your designs even more compelling and unique, create your own icons, logos, buttons, and much more. The Pen tool with Bezier curves and Boolean operations gives you the freedom to create anything you want. The rich color palettes can bring them to life, and effects like shadows and blurs can make them pop out of the screen with a 3D effect. These designs can then be added to your prototypes to breathe life into them.
Why Switch to Wondershare Mockitt?
If you’re already comfortable with the tools you’re currently using, this question is probably at the top of your mind. We’re not saying that Mockitt is better than Product X or faster than Product Y or cheaper than Product Z. All we’re saying is that it offers a zero-learning curve for anyone who wants to jump in and take advantage of its extensive and growing list of features that are being rolled out to a blazing fast schedule.
The biggest advantage of switching to a dynamically evolving SaaS application like Wondershare Mockitt is that new features are constantly in the offing. Wondershare is clearly committed to the success of this product, and if what we’ve seen with products like Filmora and PDFelement is anything to go by, then Mockitt has a very clear roadmap for the future. Getting it now would mean joining them early on their journey toward excellence in the field of UI design tools.