AMA: Adobe XD 2017

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

  • Demian Borba, 6 years ago

    Hi Levon,

    I can imagine the tool fatigue you're facing today. Right out of the gate I can see you use lots of different tools that create friction and slow your team down.

    Even before visual versioning and co-editing land in XD, which might take some time, I believe it can help your team today with:

    • Mindnode for IA: you can use the UI Kits, such as the free WF one that has some connectors that you can use to represent flows. But unfortunately, they don't stay connected like in Mindnode.

    • Sketch for mid/high fidelity: you can copy and paste elements from Sketch into XD (right click, copy SVG) and it remains editable. Once in XD, you can then create symbols to represent your components, and override text and/or bitmaps, preserving the symbol structure. All edits are possible to be made "in-context". When editing a symbol, you don't go to a specific mode that is different from your design.

    • Craft prototype, sync upload, data invision for prototyping/testing: now that XD for Windows and Mac are aligned, we can refocus the energy on shipping more and more features, and we'll invest a lot in prototyping. Stay tuned! For user testing, especially for mobile, you can cache your XD prototypes on iOS/Android devices and do real user testing, even when offline.

    • Zeplin for developer handoff: we're working a bigger feature called Design Specs. The same way you can create a prototype web link for stakeholders to review with comments and pins, developers will be able to access a link with specs (measurements, colors, etc). More news in the coming months.

    • Lingo to keep multiple libraries for color, images, symbols, logos and descriptions: we just released new features (Asset Panel and CC Libraries) that will help with you Design Systems, details here. For now, it's just for colors and character styles, but soon it will work with bitmaps as well.

    • Principle to mockup simple animations: again, we'll deliver more and more features on Prototype Mode moving forward, but I don't think it'll get to the same level of complexity of Principle or After Effects. For that, we plan to rely on integrations with AE for example.

    • Abstract to try and keep files clean, version, and merge multi design changes: we made a lot of progress on Visual Versioning, but it'll take a little more time for it to land. We don't want it to just work, but to work really well, so now we're doing all the hard work to make it happen.

    All of the items you mentioned are areas we're investing time and resources in, but building a solid and performant tool takes time. To stay informed, please upvote the features you need in UserVoice and you'll get notifications when statuses change or when we need more information.

    We'll get there, and we'd love to have you and your team helping us during this journey.

    0 points