The best apps. for design and product development you should know.

Discovering new software tools was one the most developing part when I started freelancing upon leaving Amazon.

All of a sudden I was all-in-one: graphic designer, marketer, business developer, in house lawyer and managing director. Many of those jobs were totally new for me.

Key pain points when working solo, but ones that can relate to any type of work involving teams, creativity, innovation and a client engagement include:

• How do you tell the story behind your business idea?
• How do you talk about your idea or a product?
• How do you communicate with your potential clients?
• How do you manage your daily tasks and keep yourself accountable?

All or most of those dilemmas can be easily solved with a new breed of tools which are commonly called "cloud-native applications", which per Amazon Web Services are the following:

Cloud-native applications are software programs that consist of multiple small, interdependent services called microservices.

Traditionally, developers built monolithic applications with a single block structure containing all the required functionalities.

By using the cloud-native approach, software developers break the functionalities into smaller microservices.

This makes cloud-native applications more agile as these microservices work independently and take minimal computing resources to run. (source: What is Cloud Native?)?

Examples and applications

In my freelance consulting practice, I used the apps for the following uses:

1. Graphic design,
2. Collaborative project development,
3. Professional pitch deck design, video content,
4. Process flow design, product design, prototyping,
5. Task management.

The key common elements in all of the apps that I use are the following:

• They are all community based - you leverage the community of users to provide templates or ready-to-use projects. Not always and not all for free, but still.
• They are all collaborative which means that they are perfect not only for sharing ready pieces of work but also they have advanced tools for working simultaneously in one wireframe.
• They have very similar revenue model with a combination of subscription and occasional transactional models. Even though most of them offer some version of a free of charge version - in most cases the usability of such versions is very limited.

Below are the examples of some of the apps that can be used for each of those categories:

Graphic design:

Canva (logo for this issue was created in Canva)

Powtoon

Adobe XD:

Collaborative Project Development:

Figma:

Lucid:

Draw.io:

Miro:

Whimsical - probably the best "mind maps" tool

Invision:

Professional Pitch Deck Design

Figma:

Sliddo:

Slidebean:

Process flow design, product design, prototyping

Lucidchart:

Storyboardthat:

Moqups:

Framer:

Proto.io

Task Management

Notions:

Challenges

And now for challenges. The number of apps. is astounding and growing. If you wish to have an idea about that go to producthunt.com:

Many of them are incredibly high value killer-apps which makes you think: ok, I need this one. A couple of pro-tips on how not to fall into "over-using" them and paying for things that you don't actually use.

• I have business-paid plans for the following apps: canva, figma, whimsical, notions. I do use them although I believe that I will end up stop using whimsical as it overlaps with figma (and I found figma superior).
• When choosing a billing plan, I would avoid annual. It's usually "cheaper" but considering churn it actually brings much more revenue. Choose "monthly" plan whenever possible, see if you're actually using the app, and if you do that only occasionally - go.
• It's usually the case that your need to use the app will stem out of a one-time project or the need to use just one particular feature or resource. Be extremely frugal when making decisions to invest in paid plans.
• Check your account regularly, be aware where your money goes.
• To concentrate efforts by mastering one app is much better than being mediocre in many of them.
• Use open-source material for tutorial and training.

All in all, I believe that native cloud apps for design and product development provide a fantastic toolkit for doing all sorts of cool stuff that can surprise with their quality and professionalism.

I call them one the biggest discoveries of my freelance consulting adventure!