Tools we used at UXHack in 2020
As a digital and remote first business, we have always focused on leveraging tools to the fullest for managing and growing our startup. Often when I interact with others and they learn about our full-time team size (2 members), the expression has always
As a digital and remote first business, we have always focused on leveraging tools to the fullest for managing and growing our startup.
Often when I interact with others and they learn about our full-time team size (2 members), the expression has always been surprising.
A key reason for this is because we adopt tools and automate our processes a lot.
So thought, since it is year-end, let me share a list of tools we either discovered or used much more in the year 2020 for our needs. Some of them helped us improve our offerings/experience for our users, and some for internal productivity.
- Adobe Embed PDF: If you have a requirement to embed and show PDFs on your site, do check it out. Provides a good reading experience for your readers. Have multiple embed modes. Shown here is how we use it on our platform:
- Html Css to Image: One of the interesting features we introduced for our users has been shareable scorecards. A core aspect we needed to get this working was to have an easy way to convert dynamic scorecards (i.e HTML/CSS) to image. This API based product works like a charm
- Integromat: A good alternative of Zapier at least if you are bootstrapping. So while the usual use case of this tool is to let you connect two different tools (e.g: Gmail and Sheets) for your purpose, one use case which has helped us tremendously is the ability to call our own webhook at specified time intervals.
So what this means is we don't have to create our own queue management server to let our system run a method periodically. Saves quite a hassle :)
- Markup.io: An easy way to give feedback on live websites. Helped us do UX Audits for our clients in a much more effective way. Shown below is a screenshot of an annotation on our site itself:
- Notion: From creating business proposals to PRDs to UX Audit reports, we used it a lot. The ease of use of Notion and various templates it provides, just take the final output 10x higher. And hopefully, with their APIs seeing the light in 2021 for public use, we will be perhaps more integrated. In fact, we are so excited about its API that we couldn't stop ourselves to get ideas from our community on what should Notion prioritize w.r.t APIs: https://uxhack.co/product/Notion/challenges/api-feature-set/
What tools came to your rescue in 2020?
Disclaimer: Have intentionally not mentioned tools such as Zoom/Meet, Slack (which became more of a core need this year), or other common tools
Now try it on a real brief
Enter an open UXHack challenge, get feedback from reviewers, and keep the case study for your portfolio.
