8 Essential Productivity Apps for Design Teams & Designers

Sometimes, you might find yourself juggling tasks, meetings, and deadlines. At the same time, you also need to squeeze in some time for some extra design work. Overall, the whole process doesn’t lead to a workflow that you could call highly productive.

There’s simply too much wasted time involved when you’re caught flitting from one task to another. This is especially true when some of those tasks could be taken care of automatically.

Technology has come to the rescue in many different areas. Three of the most important being in design, project management, and team collaboration.

With the right tools, you will be able to do so much more. You can transform your workflow style into one that resembles the one of a fine Swiss watch.

1. monday.com

This team management tool was created with startups and tech companies in mind. It wasn’t long however, before some decidedly non-tech companies got wind of it and began using it for their projects – and for all the right reasons. Today, Monday.com serves users across 200 different verticals, most of which are outside the tech sector.

monday.com’s Tracking Board promotes transparency and team collaboration. Whether your team consists of a designer and developer who have a constant need to collaborate with one another, or hundreds of workers spread all over the map, this team management tool has exactly what you need to build, customize, and manage workflows that precisely fit your needs.

monday.com, until recently offered under the dapulse brand name, is fast; not cat quick as once was the case, but “cheetah fast”. It has more to offer than shear speed however. The visuals you’ll work with make it almost ridiculously easy to understand what’s happening, where a project is heading, and what team members are doing -and in bright colors.

2. Taiga

The Taiga project management platform will satisfy the needs of any team, large or small, even though it is targeted to teams that follow Agile methodologies. Taiga is a free, open-source platform that will give you complete control over your project, or projects.

Taiga is incredibly easy to use and beautiful to look at. The incorporated Kanban methodology enables users to divide any type of project into easily workable stages. Kanban boards are also highly effective tools for tracking progress.

Most Agile followers are probably familiar with Epics. For those who are not, Epics on Taiga is for you if you are charged with managing or tracking several projects. You will find Epics on Taiga extremely helpful if you’re responsible for tracking or planning across interrelated projects, a task that is normally not much fun.

3. Mason

Mason could almost be described as a digital product assembly app. Although there are numerous design apps on the market that provide users with a building block approach to building a website or app, Mason takes a different and somewhat radical path. It deals in digital product features.

Mason breaks digital products down into their “atomic” parts, modifies those parts as needed, and then reassembles everything. Teams do not have to work solely with mockups or prototypes to build a product. Instead, they can build, manipulate, and deploy features on demand.

Mason also allows designers to shift the responsibility for some product maintenance tasks to non-designers, since it is easy for small business owners, marketers and the like to hotfix features like color schemes, images, or buttons on their own, without having to design anything.

Mason is free to use. You only pay when the end user can view changes.

4. ClickTime

With ClickTime, planning, tracking, and managing employee time is easy without being intrusive. This productivity app improves project visibility, so you can stay on budget, see how many hours remain on a project, and calculate both billable hours and the cost of work being performed.

You can even use Clicktime to approve employee expenses, manage time off, and see who is available to work.

5. ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab promotes efficient and effective team collaboration by keeping files, comments, feedback, and related information in one place – for everyone to see. Not only does it keep everyone associated with a task in the loop, it keeps non-task related information on a given topic in one, easy to locate place.

You will start delivering better projects by giving your work the needed structure, and allowing your team to achieve meaningful collaboration.

6. RunYourMeeting

RunYourMeeting is based on the principle that time wasted is productivity lost. As such, it provides a solution to one of a project or program manager’s worst nightmares; the time lost when participants to a meeting come unprepared.

RunYourMeeting helps you prepare, conduct, and follow up on meetings. It keeps pertinent information in one place, and tracks and updates to-do lists. It ensures that what you’ve planned to accomplish in a meeting actually gets done.

7. Futuramo Visual Tickets

Futuramo Visual Tickets is the easiest way for designers to give and receive feedback on digital projects. Teams can annotate screenshots or uploaded images and skip long issue descriptions.

This app offers an extensive set of features that allow seamless collaboration on projects: user management, tickets priority, type and status management, advanced filters and sorting features, smart search, commenting – basically all your team needs to organize work on tickets.

8. Nutcache

Like its namesake, Nutcache excels at storing things where they will be safe yet can easily be located and accessed when needed. This business-oriented Agile project management tool is dedicated to helping creative teams focus on the things that matter most.

Nutcache manages a project’s total lifecycle within Agile’s set of principles and enhances team collaboration as well.

Conclusion

You may be looking for an app that provides a solution to a given need or set of needs. Any of the apps listed here can make your workday a whole lot easier once it is put into practice.

Some apps are heavier on project management. Others are focused on team collaboration, and still others on both. There is a common thread that runs through them all – and it’s called productivity.

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