Chatbot & Voice Interface Tools Roundup

Chatbot & Voice Interface Tools Roundup

Updated January 2, 2021. See this twitter thread for details.

Love them or not – chatbots, virtual assistants and other Conversational Interfaces (CUIs) are out there. Some are finding traction where use cases emerge that can unlock their potential.

Here’s a roundup of tools that cover everything from simple prototypes, to #nocode implementations, to development platforms for rolling out sophisticated and secure Enterprise-grade CUIs for both voice and chat.

Illustration: chat bot by Souvik Bhattacharjee from the Noun Project

An Unopinionated Roundup of Current Prototyping Tools

An Unopinionated Roundup of Current Prototyping Tools

Updated March 18, 2021. See this twitter thread for details.

I’ve shared various lists, roundups, and reviews of different prototyping tools in the past – usually on Twitter. Sometimes, people will point out that a particular third-party roundup review has overlooked a specific product or seems biased.

I’ve created a running list of all the screen design and prototyping tools I’m aware of in an Airtable database. The live-updating list is embedded below for your reference. I have only used some of these solutions. If you are interested in my opinion or think I missed anything, please get in touch via email or on Twitter (TLDR, my primary tool right now is Figma).

The list is simple in format and has a direct link to the product’s website. I do not expect this will be enough information to help you decide which tool(s) to choose.

There are lots of great product reviews already out there. If you find a tool of interest, I’m sure you are a quick Google search away from a detailed article or comparison.

Happy prototyping, and don’t forget to get feedback from actual prospects & customers!

Illustrations: Website Prototype by Creative Stall, and prototype by David Gomez from the Noun Project

Webinar Recording – UX Design: Prototyping as Process

Webinar Recording – UX Design: Prototyping as Process

Aquent Gymnasium offers a series of Webinars. Dave Rupert and I participated as panelists in their May 14, 2019 conversation regarding Prototyping.

Over the years, prototyping has become an integral part of digital product development. Learn the ins and outs of modern design documentation and the new tools that aim to improve it from three industry experts.

Source: Aquent Gymnasium Website

Thanks again to Dave, Jeremy and the team at Aquent Gymnasium for the opportunity to participate!

A Roundup of New Tools That Mingle Visual UI Design & Code

A Roundup of New Tools That Mingle Visual UI Design & Code

I’ve been intrigued by the potential endgame of a single environment that could satisfy the needs and modes of operation for both visual UI designers and developers. Convergence of tools has been a theme of my “Looking Ahead” new year blog entries for 2017 and 2018.

Typical UI Design tools still offer an excellent working model for quickly manifesting design ideas at any level of fidelity. Many of us know of situations where a well-executed mockup that took 30 minutes to render in a design tool (drawing pictures of screens) might get a dev estimate of many hours or days to execute (QA’d production code).

As long as that dynamic exists, many designers will continue to prefer WYSIWYG drawing tool interfaces over working directly in code – especially when they are early in the ideation process.

Popular tools like Figma, Sketch and AdobeXD continue to make moves toward exporting out to React and potentially other libraries. However, as of now, these are one-way, and the real deal will be bi-directional or zero-conversion options.

Here’s a roundup of new tools looking to shorten or even eliminate the distance between drawings of screens and production-ready code (in alphabetical order).

Alva

Alva – “Alva lets you design interactive products based on components engineered by your developers. And guess what – we are entirely open source.”

Haiku

Haiku – “Design components that snap into any codebase: Unlock your creativity with the world’s most expressive UI builder”

Interplay

Interplay – Fast prototyping that combines the power of design systems, production code components and live collaboration.”

Iterative.ly

Iterative.ly – “Iterate on top of your live app using your design system. Launch an experiment in under 10 minutes. Continuously improve your product.”

Modulz

Modulz – “The visual code editor for designing and building digital products—without writing code.”

Supernova

Supernova – “Design and development tool unlike anything you’ve experienced. #nomoresnippets – always a production-ready code.”