TOOLS
Tools for UCD teams
Tools commonly used by user-centred design and service delivery teams — for design, research, workshops, planning, and AI-assisted work. Descriptions focus on how each tool fits UCD practice.
None of these listings imply endorsement. Tool choices depend on your team, organisation, and phase of delivery. For framework guidance, see our methods index and delivery phase guides.
DESIGN & PROTOTYPING
Design & prototyping
Figma Design
Collaborative UI design on a shared canvas — wireframes, high-fidelity screens, components, and interactive prototypes. Real-time co-editing and Dev Mode help design and engineering stay aligned from Alpha through Beta.
Figma Make
Prompt-to-app tool inside Figma that turns designs or ideas into functional prototypes and web apps through conversation. Useful in Alpha when you need something clickable quickly without a full engineering build.
FigJam
Figma's online whiteboard for brainstorming, workshops, retros, and journey mapping. Keeps ideation and alignment in the same ecosystem as your design files — from kick-offs through sprint planning.
Adobe XD
Vector UI design and prototyping tool from Adobe, with Creative Cloud integration for teams already on Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe has ended new feature development, so many teams now use it for legacy projects rather than new work.
Sketch
Mac-native interface design tool with a focused canvas, symbols, and a strong plugin ecosystem. Still popular with product designers who want a dedicated desktop app and fine control over UI craft.
COLLABORATION WHITEBOARDS
Collaboration whiteboards
Miro
AI-powered infinite canvas for workshops, journey maps, service blueprints, and cross-functional planning. Integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, and Slack — common in discovery workshops and delivery planning.
Mural
Visual work platform built for facilitated sessions — timers, voting, private mode, and workshop templates for retros, empathy maps, and design sprints. Strong fit for teams on Microsoft 365 and structured ceremonies.
DELIVERY & PLANNING
Delivery & planning
Azure DevOps
Microsoft's end-to-end developer platform — agile boards, backlogs, repos, pipelines, and test plans. Helps multidisciplinary teams link user stories, design tasks, and engineering work in one place through Discovery to Live.
Trello
Visual Kanban boards for tracking tasks, requests, and lightweight workflows. Often used to triage design feedback, coordinate cross-team requests, or give non-technical stakeholders a simple view of progress.
USER RESEARCH
User research
Condens
Qualitative analysis platform for organising interviews, tagging highlights, and building affinity maps on an infinite whiteboard. AI assists with transcription, tagging suggestions, and clustering — best after sessions are recorded.
Dovetail
AI-native customer intelligence hub that unifies interviews, support tickets, sales calls, and surveys into searchable, cited insight. Helps research teams scale synthesis and lets stakeholders self-serve evidence-backed answers.
Lookback
Purpose-built for moderated and unmoderated research with screen, face, and voice capture. Observer rooms let teammates watch live; AI features accelerate notes, summaries, and pattern-finding across sessions.
AI ASSISTANTS
AI assistants
Claude Cowork
Anthropic's agentic desktop workspace for delegating multi-step tasks across files and connected business tools — without a terminal. Useful for research synthesis, document prep, and operational workflows alongside design delivery.
ChatGPT
General-purpose conversational AI for drafting interview guides, workshop plans, content drafts, and plain-language explanations. A flexible thinking partner — always verify outputs against your own evidence.
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft's AI assistant across Microsoft 365, Windows, and GitHub. Helps teams summarise meetings, draft documents, and get code suggestions inside the tools many enterprises already use day to day.
DEVELOPMENT
Development
Cursor
AI-first code editor built on VS Code for writing, refactoring, and exploring codebases with chat and agent workflows. Bridges design-to-build when prototyping in code or pairing with engineers on Alpha spikes.
OpenAI Codex
OpenAI's agentic coding model that plans and executes multi-step software tasks — available through ChatGPT. Relevant when teams want AI to implement prototypes or iterate on front-end code from designs or specs.
Visual Studio Code
Free, extensible editor from Microsoft with thousands of extensions for linting, accessibility checks, and design handoff. The common baseline for developers — and the foundation for AI editors like Cursor.
AFFILIATE PICKS
Recommended tools
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