MacDirectory 75
FEATURE
Adobe XD – The Experience is Everything
BY RIC GETTER
Those were the words of
Scott Belsky, Adobe's Chief
Product Officer and Executive
Vice president at the opening
of a press briefing announcing
the latest release of the
company's user experience
(UX) design software. That's a
strong statement coming from
Adobe itself.
Is the user experience design
behind the apps and mobile
sites we use really that
important? As longtime users
of Apple's products, we think
so. This was the locus of
Steve Jobs' genius that built
his company to one of the
most successful in the world
while totally disrupting at least
three industries—personal
computing, mobile phones,
and music. So yes, UX design
and innovation count for a lot.
In terms of software design,
Adobe has thrown down the
gauntlet to be the leader of
that change.
XD incubated as a public
beta for the first two years of
its life, with Adobe garnering
feedback and ideas from the
design community. It was
finally released as a production
product last year as part of
Creative Cloud 2017. As
dramatic and complex as the
implications of the product
are, its use is fairly easy to
explain. It lets you come up
with a design for a mobile app
and transform it into a working
prototype that can be handed
off to coders to more easily
and accurately implement.
Getting Wired
You can start out with a basic
wireframe that defines the
essential layout of a page.
Each screen the user will
see in an app appears as
a separate artboard in XD;
a performance boost in the
latest release lets it easily
handle thousands of them in
a single project. These are
graphically "wired" together,
letting you define the kind
of transitions in between
them. When you move into
XD's prototype mode, you
get to see (and share) those
interactions.
The different design elements
and assets are stored in
the new Asset Panel and
changes to a source object
are reflected immediately
wherever it appears. Loading
the assets panel is simply a
matter of dragging an artboard
into the appropriate panel,
colors, text styles, symbols,
etc. With the Asset Panel, you
can change a font or color and
see it instantly reflected in the
design wherever that element
appears.
"We believe that Adobe XD will be as
big, if not bigger, than Photoshop."
