Adobe XD is a vector-based tool for designing and prototyping user experiences for web and mobile apps. Switch easily from wire framing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping, previewing, and sharing, all in one powerful tool.
XD is made for all types of creators - UX/UI designers, interaction designers, experience designers, product designers, web designers, app designers, visual designers, entrepreneurs, and more.
The October 2018 release of XD has the following new exciting features:
- Design and prototype using voice commands and speech playback
- Authoring and playback with auto-animate and drag gestures
- Cross-document asset sharing with linked symbols
- Design tooling innovation through plugins
- Seamless assets transfer with After Effects and Illustrator
- Win10 live device preview on iOS
Adobe XD provides an easy-to-use solution that lets you use voice commands to trigger an interaction between artboards. Like using a Click or a Tap as a Trigger, you can use speech to trigger a prototype interaction and speech playback as a triggered action. Speech playback gives designers access to a powerful text-to-speech engine to help you design for new platforms like voice assistants and smart speakers. For more information, see Voice design and prototyping.
Adobe XD has evolved from a basic click-through application to providing you divergent prototyping options such as Time, Tap, Drag, and Voice.
From Adobe XD 13.0, designers can use auto-animate combined with drag gestures to create micro-interactions across artboards for rich prototype experiences such as onboarding flows, animations for carousels, cards, and lists or progress indicators. When you duplicate an element and change its properties (size, position, color, and so on), XD animates them from the original values on the first artboard to the final value on the second artboard. Deceptively simple to use, use auto-animate to create stunning effects and transitions that help you communicate an animated end user experience. Drag Gestures in XD takes the auto-animate feature one step further by allowing you to simulate the drag experience of touch-enabled devices. You can view playback of animations in the preview window and mobile apps only. For more information, see Create prototypes with auto-animate.
With the exponential growth of design teams within organizations coupled with ever-increasing design surfaces, designers are challenged to share and synchronize linked symbols across documents.
With linked symbols, it’s easier than ever to stay on top of changes to symbols you frequently use or use in multiple documents. Now, those symbols can remain linked, so when you make changes to the source document you'll be able to accept the same changes in all documents where the symbol appears.
This feature is intended for designers working on collaborative applications with extended teams, or designers reusing linked symbols across multiple projects. For more information, see Work with linked symbols.
Adobe XD launches the first wave of plugins, which will help you automate tasks, integrate with other tools, leverage data in your designs, and much more. This also includes integrations with some of the best collaboration and productivity apps on the market, including Slack, JIRA, and Microsoft Teams.
For information on getting started with plugins, see Plugins for XD.
From Adobe XD 13.0, designers can transfer layout designs and assets from Illustrator by opening. Ai files from within Adobe XD. The new fast and convenient workflow enables designers to seamlessly transfer assets with native mapping of layers, artboards, artwork, and vectors with best visual fidelity, and streamline collaborative environments in different stages of UX process. For more information, see Open Illustrator files in XD.
Feature benefits:
- Seamless usage of Illustrator assets in prototypes: transfer icons, logos, and other vector assets into XD and use UI Kits or full libraries created in Illustrator yet retain layers, with full editability and visual fidelity.
- Collaborate to create interactive designs: open Illustrator files in XD and use XD’s powerful prototyping and collaboration features.
With Adobe XD 13.0, designers can easily export XD designs (selected layers or whole artboards) into After Effects to create custom UI animations and micro-interactions. Designers can seamlessly export layers, artboards, artwork, and vectors with equal visual fidelity and use After Effect’s powerful plugin ecosystem to streamline their collaboration with the developers. For more information, see Exporting assets to After Effects.
Feature benefits:
- Get full control of your animations: Designers can use After Effects to create custom animations and micro-interactions, tweak transitions, or use video assets in your designs.
- Seamless asset transfer: With this integration, you can enjoy quick asset transfer and native mapping of layers, vectors, and artwork resulting in faster turnaround from design to custom animations.
- Leverage plugins: You can extend your animations and collaboration with developers by using After Effects’ plugin ecosystem tailored for UX design process.
From XD 13.0 onwards, designers with Windows OS can use an USB connection to preview their designs on iOS. For more information, see Preview on mobile devices.
