Communication

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• Hipchat
  • Hipchat is a team chat collaboration tool by Atlassian that we use at MedicSana. It’s closest competitor, Slack, is also worth checking out. Honestly, we liked Slack better, but Hipchat was cheaper! Both of these tools are specifically built for team collaboration making them much better than traditional interfaces like IRC or Skype.
• Slack 
  • A prettier, more solid version of Hipchat with a much more reliable app.
• Mural
  • Built to be a design collaboration tool, Mural is basically a large, open board that can be filled with Post-It notes, common frameworks (such as the Business Model Canvas) and other things. We love using it as a visual element that everyone can simultaneously contribute to while we’re connected over skype or Google hang-outs in our meetings. It is also great for soliciting feedback on designs, etc…

Documentation

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• Confluence
  • Confluence is Atlassian’s decently well functioning wiki system. We use it for design documentation and as an easy repository of other company information. I talk a little bit more about my own documentation habits using Confluence here.
• Snag-It
  • Well known by Windows users (but not so much by the Mac community where the functinoality is built in to the OS) Snag-It is small piece of software for screen shotting. While it is a little more cumbersome to take screen shots than Mac’s built-in capabilities, the software is worth it for it’s easy editing capabilities.
• Telecine
  • Telecine is a simple little app for Android that records a video of your screen. Perfect for recording bugs for documentation or recording little interaction paradigms in other apps.

Project Management

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• JIRA
  • Atlassian’s classic ticket tracking tool for Scrum or Kanban boards. I personally think that JIRA is kind of a usability nightmare, but with the right setup it can be a powerful tool.
• Wrike
  • A direct competitor of Asana, Wrike is a project management system. We used Wrike quite a bit in MedicSana operations as a whole, though tended to rely on JIRA for the day-to-day development tasks.
  • From what I understand, it is a toss up between Wrike and Asana with advantages to each. We went with Wrike because of it’s built-in Gantt feature.
  • We also used Wrike to organize our Hiring Process.

Generating Artifacts

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• Adobe Illustrator
  • The old classic! Illustrator is a vector-based drawing program that was originally intended for, well, illustration. Like many of the Adobe products (cough…photoshop…), as it was best in class for a while, people started using it for other things. I still use it for wireframing because the interface for drawing (in my opinion) is still one of the best. It is getting surpassed, though, by more powerful programs like Sketch that have more purpose-built functionality for designing interfaces.
• Sketch
  • I run Windows, so I don’t actually know anything about Sketch, but my mac-using friends love it. The nice thing about it is that it seems to have a great workflow for working with Framer JS – another piece of software that isn’t available on Windows 🙁
• Invision
  • Invision is a very simple, easy, low-functionality prototyping tool. It allows users to drag and drop image files of wireframes into it’s online application and connect different pages together by drawing hitpoints. Prototypes can then be emailed or texted to users or stakeholders for demos. While the functionality is severely limited, it is perfect and fast for small tests and prototypes.
• JustinMind
  • JustinMind is a more dynamic prototyper (Similar to Macaw and unlike Framer in that you don’t need to code to build things. In all three of these programs, code can be packaged and exported). I’ve used JustinMind to great effect at my last job building high-resolution prototypes for in-person prototyping. When it comes to testing specific animations and interactions, it is a powerful program, but it is quite cumbersome. We barely ended up using it at all at MedicSana – generally a sketch and conversation with the devs would be enough.

Code and Builds

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• BitBucket
• HockeyApp