AMA: Adobe XD 2017

6 years ago from Demian Borba, Product Manager for Adobe XD

  • Andrew Shorten, 6 years ago

    With the foundation of new technology, performance and high quality, we're focusing our attention on the depth of features provided. You've made a number of comments here, but what would be most helpful is hearing the specific list of things that would make XD your go-to app.

    Thanks, Andrew (Adobe).

    0 points
    • Cristian MoiseiCristian Moisei, 6 years ago

      Sure, here's what it would take (for me):

      1. If XD was on par with PS or Sketch in terms of features (which it certainly is not), I would not consider its speed a good enough reason to switch. It would need to bring a more efficient approach to design to make the switch worth it. The repeat grid is a good example of this, it takes a common thing designers do and makes it easy, it's a feature that was designed for the modern world, and something apps like PS or Sketch (which were made for the market of 20 years ago) lack. Sadly, everything else is pretty standard in XD: the same layers panel, the same way to create every shape manually and set properties for each layer.

      Designs are no longer static, we create huge systems that are a pain to maintain with static apps, so we'd need a tool that finds more efficient ways to:

      • Manage styles and components globally (in a live app, if you change the outline colour and padding-bottom value of a field, every single field with that class updates also, whereas in apps like PS/Sketch/XD if you want to increase the bottom padding of fields, you have to move every single one of them alongside everything underneath them down by 10px then crop your art-board to account for the change.)
      • Make it possible and easy to design for multiple resolutions without having to create a different art-board for every single resolution you want to cover.
      • Make it easy for developers to pick up the design. Tools like Avocode do this well, but XD doesn't integrate with them.
      • As per point 2, it would also help a lot if it was easy to share prototypes with stakeholders and gather feedback without having to rely on external tools like InVision, which are based on static images so if I change the colour of my header and my document has 200 slides, I now have to re-export 200 images and upload them all to InVision, making sure they have the same name and no upload failed (which happens more often than you'd think in InVision).
      1. UI Design is never done in isolation, the work needs to be easy to share with stakeholders, easy for developers to take over, easy for other designers to collaborate on. It's also important how invested the community is in a certain tool, because the more people use it, the more resources for it you'll find.

      On this end, I think XD is nowhere nearly widely adopted enough to make it safe to switch. Apps like Avocode don't support it, it doesn't have the powerful exporting tools in Sketch or PS for sharing with others or uploading to InVision. Fragmentation is already a problem - for example I (a PS user) am leaving my company at the end of the week and the person replacing me uses Sketch. This means he cannot rely directly on any of my work, he has to recreate it from scratch.

      All of this means you pretty much have to go against the tide to use XD in a professional setting.

      1 point
      • Interested Curious, 6 years ago

        What I've noticed is a lot of UX designers forced themselves into photoshop for things that indesign does.

        Like the global changes for text is pretty easily done with the paragraph styles and character styles for indesign.

        Maybe those can be implemented in XD in the future.

        The support for multiple resolutions is almost there by default thanks to it being a primarily vector based application.

        I won't pretend to be fully entranced in the history of why photoshop was the go to in UX over Ai or ID but it's always seemed curious.

        0 points