Google Trend shows that the search demand for the term "UX" has been almost doubled in the past 5 years. And when you compare it to a neighboring and similarly popular term such as "Design Thinking", you can realize the explosion in demand for UX design.

My name is Behrad and I'm the founder of Bonanza Design — an innovation studio based in Berlin. We're specialized in UX design for complex applications especially SaaS applications.As a result, this is our obsession to always check the latest tools and see which one we can use to foster our UX design process.

LET ME SHARE WITH YOU HOW I STARTED WITH UX DESIGN

In 2012, I graduated from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. I studied Design Thinking and I was fascinated by UX Design.I moved to Berlin to pursue UX Design in the booming Berlin startup scene. In 2012, the queen of UX Design (and web design) was Adobe Photoshop without a doubt. Increasingly more people joined the field and complained about how slow it was to design with Adobe Photoshop.I was one of them! I used to use Inkscape (an open-source software - still exists) then Adobe Illustrator for app design.Then after a while, Sketch came into being and that changed everything. I mean everything!. I was a happy customer from day one. Still, remember the joy of using Sketch vividly.And then within a short span of time, a slew of add ons for Sketch such as InVision and MarvelApp came to being.Fast forward, everyone started complaining about how slow (!) Sketch when it comes to team collaboration. Another big problem: It's only made for mac. So the windows users couldn't use it at all.Then Adobe pulled up its sleeves and started working on Adobe XD. Then Figma came to being and Invision also introduced InVision Studio. And besides all of them, there it was a nerd called Framer!And there has been a tectonic shift happening and the primary contenders for an all-around UX tool are Sketch, Adobe XD and Figma at the moment.We ran a survey and asked UX designers and product people which software they currently use for UX design and the answer was an almost tie between Figma and Adobe XD.

There's still not enough evidence to confirm whether which app has the most majority of active users as of now.

The majority of our enterprise clients still use Sketch because of several reasons

1. Sketch is perfected for the macOS environment. The majority of product people in enterprise environment uses a mac2. Sketch seems to be most reliable when it comes to data security3. Enterprises are usually amongst the late majority when it comes to innovation adoptionAt Bonanza Design, we still haven't had the chance to work with Adobe XD. For us, a combination of Figma and Sketch suffices. We're increasingly using Figma over Sketch, although Sketch is much smoother when it comes to heavy screen design work.

Our current software stack is

All-Around UX Design: Figma, SketchGraphic Design: Illustrator and PhotoshopAnimation: After effects, Framer3D: BlenderWhy do we prefer Figma over Sketch?Ease of collaboration. That's it.Figma has more or less the same feature sets as Sketch. There are lots of plugins available for it to ease up your work. However, the real gem is in the fact that it's a browser-based application.As soon as you create a project, a unique link is created and you can share it with your team and client. And everyone can work at the same time in the same environment. Happy ending!I hope this article helps you to make better decisions when it comes to choosing an all-around UX tool. In case you have any question, please contact us at contact@bonanza.designIn case you have more experience with Adobe XD, please share your experience with us as well.