Tools on Fernando Ruiz

Condens

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Condens is a user research repository platform and qualitative analysis tool. Like its main competitor, [[Dovetail]], it helps teams centralize, analyze, and share their research data to build continuous, accessible knowledge about their users.

What Is Condens?

Imagine you are a detective and each interview or usability test is a clue. You accumulate notes, videos, and observations. A repository like Condens is your digital investigation board: a central place where you put all the clues, connect them with red threads (tags), and discover the pattern to solve the case. It is not just a place to store files – it is a tool for building knowledge.

Dovetail

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Dovetail is a user research platform and qualitative data repository. It helps teams organize, analyze, and collaborate on their research data (such as interview transcripts, notes, videos) to find patterns and share insights in a centralized and accessible way.

What Is Dovetail?

Imagine a library for your user knowledge. Instead of books, the shelves contain your [[User Interviews|interviews]], [[Usability Testing|test]] recordings, and survey responses. Dovetail is that library. It allows you not only to store these “books,” but also to highlight the most important passages (highlights), put sticky notes on them (tags), and then group all the notes on the same topic to write a summary (an insight).

FigJam

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Figma’s whiteboarding tool for collaborative ideation and synthesis—seamlessly integrated with your design files.

What is FigJam?

FigJam is Figma’s answer to collaborative whiteboarding. It’s built into Figma, meaning you can jump from a design file to a whiteboard without leaving the app. It supports real-time collaboration, voting, sticky notes, drawing, and infinite canvas.

Unlike Miro (a standalone tool), FigJam lives inside Figma. If your design system is in Figma, your ideation can happen in FigJam right next to it. Switching between design and thinking is seamless.

Figma for UX Designers: A Complete Guide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

How to use Figma for wireframing, prototyping, collaboration, and design handoff.

What is Figma?

Imagine a whiteboard that never gets full, that your entire team can draw on at the same time from anywhere in the world, and that automatically saves every change—that’s Figma. Figma is a web-based design tool that lets you create wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, and design systems all in one place. Unlike desktop tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, everything lives in the browser. You don’t install anything. You open a link, and your team is already there, collaborating in real-time.

Google Analytics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web analytics platform from Google that tracks and reports on website traffic. For UX designers, it is a fundamental source of [[Quantitative Data]] for understanding at scale how users find and interact with a digital product.

What Is Google Analytics?

Imagine you are the manager of a large shopping mall. Google Analytics is the security cameras and motion sensors. They don’t tell you if people liked a store, but they give you crucial data: how many people entered the mall, through which door, which aisles they walked through, which stores they spent the most time in, and at what point they turned around and left.

Hotjar for UX

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A behavior analytics tool that shows where users click, scroll, and spend time—visual data about real user behavior.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is behavior analytics for websites. It records user sessions and creates heatmaps showing where users click, scroll, and spend time. You see actual user behavior, not guesses.

Hotjar answers: “Where do users look? Where do they click? Where do they get stuck?” Video recordings show real users struggling. Heatmaps show aggregate patterns.

Lyssna

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A lightweight feedback collection tool that gathers user responses through simple links—no installations required.

What is Lyssna?

Lyssna is a feedback collection platform for designers. Paste a link to a prototype, design, or survey. Share the link. Collect user feedback. That’s it.

Unlike UserTesting or Respondent (which record full sessions), Lyssna is lightweight. Users answer questions you ask. Quick feedback. Lower cost. Faster turnaround.

One sentence punch: Lyssna is the fastest way to collect user feedback on designs—share a link, get responses in hours.**

Maze

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Maze is a “rapid testing” platform that integrates directly with design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch. It allows designers to quickly test their prototypes, collect feedback, and obtain quantitative usability metrics in an unmoderated fashion.

What Is Maze?

Imagine you have designed an interactive [[Prototypes|prototype]] in Figma. You want to know if people understand it, but you don’t have time to organize 5 moderated [[Usability Testing]] sessions. With Maze, you can send a link to your prototype to hundreds of people and, within hours, get an automatic report with metrics like success rate, the paths users took, and click heatmaps.

Miro

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

An infinite digital whiteboard for collaborative design, diagramming, and team alignment—essential for distributed teams.

What is Miro?

Miro is a collaborative whiteboarding platform that works like a physical whiteboard but digital and synchronous. Multiple people can draw, write, sticky-note, and diagram simultaneously. Real-time collaboration means everyone sees updates instantly.

Miro works for user journeys, empathy mapping, site maps, brainstorming, personas, workflows, and any diagram that requires group thinking. It’s not a design tool like Figma; it’s a thinking tool for teams.

Mixpanel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Mixpanel is an advanced product analytics platform that focuses on event tracking to understand user behavior over time. Unlike [[Google Analytics]], which is page-centric, Mixpanel is user-centric and action-centric (events), tracking what users do within an application.

What Is Mixpanel?

Imagine your product is a video game. [[Google Analytics]] would tell you how many players have entered each room of the castle. Mixpanel, on the other hand, would tell you how many times player “Link” has used the sword, how many have opened the treasure chest, and how many of those who got the sword are still playing a week later.

Notion for UX

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A documentation and knowledge base tool that centralizes UX docs, research, design systems, and team processes—your design system’s home.

What is Notion for UX?

Notion is a all-in-one workspace for documentation. Designers use it to document design systems, research findings, design specifications, and team processes. It’s not a design tool; it’s a knowledge repository.

Think of it as your design team’s wiki. Design specs live here. Personas live here. Brand guidelines live here. Research insights live here. Everything interconnected with links and databases.

Optimal Workshop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A suite of tools for information architecture validation—card sort, tree test, and click tests reveal how users organize and find information.

What is Optimal Workshop?

Optimal Workshop is a research platform specializing in information architecture (IA). It provides three main tools: card sorting, tree testing, and first-click testing. All three measure how users organize, navigate, and find information.

Card sorting asks: “How would you organize these items?” Tree testing asks: “Can you find this item in this structure?” First-click testing asks: “Where would you click to find this item?” Each reveals different aspects of IA.

Principle

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A Mac-only animation prototyping tool that makes complex animations easy—perfect for microinteractions and transitions.

What is Principle?

Principle is a Mac-only prototyping tool specialized in animations. If Figma prototyping feels limiting for animations, Principle fills the gap. It’s drag-and-drop animation creation without learning After Effects.

Principle excels at easing curves, timing, and sequencing animations. Complex animation sequences that take hours in After Effects take minutes in Principle.

One sentence punch: Principle makes animation prototyping as easy as interaction design—no animation software experience needed.**

ProtoPie

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

A prototyping tool for complex interactions—animations, gestures, variables, and logic without code.

What is ProtoPie?

ProtoPie is a prototyping tool designed for complex interactions that Figma’s prototyping can’t handle. Need a countdown timer? A calculator logic? Conditional flows based on user input? ProtoPie handles it.

ProtoPie works like this: import designs from Figma, add interactions through the ProtoPie editor, and share via link. No coding required. The result is an interactive prototype that feels like a real app.

Storybook

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Storybook is an open-source development tool for building, testing, and documenting UI components in isolation. It allows developers to create components in a “sandbox” environment outside the main application, making it easy to visualize all their states and collaborate with designers.

What Is Storybook?

Imagine you are building a car with LEGO pieces. Storybook is like a workshop where you can build and test each piece separately before assembling the car. You can build the engine (a complex component) and test it on its own, or you can build a simple wheel (a button) and see all its available colors and sizes, all without needing the complete car chassis.

Useberry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Useberry is an unmoderated usability testing platform, very similar to [[Maze]]. It allows product teams to get quick feedback and quantitative data on prototypes, designs, and information architectures, integrating with tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD.

What Is Useberry?

Imagine you have created interactive floor plans of a house on your computer ([[Prototypes]]). You want to know if people can easily find the bathroom from the entrance, but you can’t invite 200 people to your studio to try it one by one. Useberry lets you send those floor plans to 200 people over the internet, ask them to “find the bathroom,” and returns a detailed report with the paths they took, where they got lost, and how long it took – all automatically.

UserTesting.com

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

UserTesting.com is one of the largest and most well-known user experience research platforms. It allows companies to get video feedback from real users interacting with websites, applications, prototypes, and more. Its main value proposition is its enormous participant panel, which allows you to get feedback from very specific user profiles within hours.

What Is UserTesting.com?

Imagine you need the opinion of “mothers aged 30 to 40 who live in Mexico and have purchased car insurance online in the last 6 months.” Finding these people on your own would be a titanic task. UserTesting.com is like a giant casting agency for user research. You define the exact profile you need, and they provide participants who fit that profile, record their sessions as they perform the tasks you request, and deliver the videos for you to analyze.

Zeroheight

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

info Quick Definition

Zeroheight is an online platform that allows you to create, document, and maintain [[Design System]] websites in a centralized and collaborative way. It integrates directly with design tools like Figma and development tools like [[Storybook]] to create a “single source of truth” for your entire design system.

What Is Zeroheight?

Imagine your [[Design System]] is a cookbook. Figma is where you design the photos of the dishes (the visual components). [[Storybook]] is where the chefs write and test the recipes (the component code). Zeroheight is the publisher that takes those photos and recipes and publishes them in an online cookbook, beautiful and easy to use, so everyone in the “restaurant” (your company) knows how to cook the dishes consistently.