What is Adobe XD and what is it used for?

Design at the Speed of Thought

Whether you’re whiteboarding an idea or finishing up production-ready designs, Adobe XD has tools to help you communicate your thoughts quickly and effectively.

Components & States

Once you’ve created it, you can use it everywhere. Components in Adobe XD make it easier to reuse basic elements like buttons and navigation while maintaining consistency across your design. If you establish a Main Component, any changes you make to it will be reflected across all instances.

Component States allow you to create variations on a single component, and add interactions between those states that are applied to all instances. Use Component States to create Hover, click, or loading interactions on a button, or to add toggle effects for radio buttons and toggles. States also helps you clean up your canvas, limiting the number of artboards required to achieve the same effects and flows.

Stacks and Padding

Stacks and Padding will save you a lot of time if you’re working with dynamic material, such as changing button labels, rearranging portions of content, or simply experimenting with different modal designs.

Padding is a Content Aware Layout feature that keeps a certain amount of space between a group’s content and the outer borders, or background. When padding is enabled, the outside space within a group remains consistent while a button label or content is added to it. There will be no more pixel modifications when a call to action label is altered.

Stacks extends Padding’s functionality by allowing content groupings to be adjusted with a single click and drag. Do you want to increase the number of elements in the group? The spacing between items is automatically maintained and can be modified on an individual basis or across the entire Stack.

Repeat Grid

Creating repeated content, such as a card carousel, a data table, or a photo gallery, can take up a lot of time during the design process. Updating that content and maintaining copies in sync as iteration occurs can eat up time that could be better spent elsewhere.

The Repeat Grid is here to assist you. You can automate the tiresome process of repeating content with the push of a button. Any object, or set of objects, can be repeated horizontally and vertically once enabled. Drag images and text files into the Repeat Grid to override text and artwork, making the transition from wireframe to higher resolution designs easier.

3D Transforms

3D Transforms make it simple to add perspective to your projects. The intuitive space controls and simplicity of 3D Transforms make it easier to create experiences for augmented and virtual reality, in-car entertainment systems, or just exhibiting work in captivating ways.

Responsive Resize

The world, like the technology we design for, is ever-changing. The software we create arrives in many shapes and sizes, from smart watches to tablets to televisions. Responsive Resize understands your layouts intelligently, making creating for a new format as simple as dragging to fit.

Make Interactive Prototypes that are Rich

It doesn’t have to be difficult to present prototypes that feel authentic. The tools of Adobe XD are focused on creating robust, realistic prototypes, and they make it quick and easy to generate prototypes that feel like a final product.

Create rich Interactive Prototypes

It doesn’t have to be difficult to present prototypes that feel authentic. The tools of Adobe XD are focused on creating robust, realistic prototypes, and they make it quick and easy to generate prototypes that feel like a final product.

Auto-Animate

Auto-Animate unlocks the intelligence contained inside Adobe XD, giving you the ability to add motion and micro-interactions to your designs. With Auto-Animate, you can bring a static design to life, add realism to user testing, and provide visual feedback throughout user flows.

Auto-Animate controls are easy yet powerful for conveying the design concept, whether you’re adding a hover state to a button or animating a dashboard loading sequence.

Triggers and Inputs

Today’s engagement takes numerous forms, from traditional inputs to touch and speech, and designs must adapt to accommodate these various interaction styles. Adobe XD helps us record how consumers engage with the prototype by supporting a number of trigger and input types. You’ll be building everything from mobile apps to video games, from simple taps and drags to more complex triggers like speech, bluetooth gamepad controllers, and keyboard keystrokes.

Voice prototyping

As the first experience design platform to offer functionality for voice interaction, Adobe XD enables you to create rich voice experiences for designing voice assistants, accessible applications, and more. In Adobe XD, an entire audio-only user flow can be designed, leveraging voice commands paired with speech and audio playback. If you’re building a skill or workflow for Alexa or Google Assistant, those prototypes can be previewed directly on a compatible device.

Today’s engagement takes numerous forms, from traditional inputs to touch and speech, and designs must adapt to accommodate these various interaction styles. Adobe XD helps us record how consumers engage with the prototype by supporting a number of trigger and input types. You’ll be building everything from mobile apps to video games, from simple taps and drags to more complex triggers like speech, bluetooth gamepad controllers, and keyboard keystrokes.

Real-Time Preview

Understanding how your design looks and feels on the target device is very important, but you don’t always have a device on hand. Adobe XD offers two powerful functions for designing with real-time previews. If you’re designing on a smartphone or tablet you can plug it in to your machine and get real-time preview on-device. If you don’t have the device you’re designing for, you can use the preview window in Adobe XD to generate live, as you design previews.

Share what you Require

Collecting and analysing feedback is an important aspect of the design iterative process. Adobe XD has the capabilities to make your life easier and communication more successful, whether you’re sharing with an executive team, doing user tests, or preparing your work for development.

Share what you need

Collecting and analysing feedback is an important aspect of the design iterative process. Adobe XD has the capabilities to make your life easier and communication more successful, whether you’re sharing with an executive team, doing user tests, or preparing your work for development.

Customized share links

You may quickly prepare your file for full screen user tests, a design review, or handoff to development teams by sharing design specifications from share mode, which comes with many predefined sharing kinds to pick from. Whether it’s comments, a full-screen view for user testing, or specs, variables, and assets when handing off to a development team, each view shows exactly what you need.

Comments, pins, and mentions

Keep up with the latest developments by following the Design Review and Development share links. Team members can leave and pin comments as they evaluate designs, and you’ll get a notification through Creative Cloud about the continuing conversation — perfect for asynchronous reviews and documentation.

For issues that require a rapid reaction, the mention feature lets you and your colleagues to draw others’ attention by mentioning them in the comments section. These features work together to help you document and track feedback. To keep everything in one place, mark comments as resolved or reply in-line.

What Is Adobe XD Used for?

Adobe XD was created with mobile and web experiences in mind, although it has many other applications. Adobe XD’s robust capabilities are being used by design teams all around the world for their whole experience design process and much more.

User Flows and Whiteboarding

Adobe XD lends itself well to remote and in-person brainstorming sessions because to a multitude of plugins and a lightweight interface. Keep your ideas and designs in the same file and collaborate on them. To keep your team on track, use tools like the Whiteboard plugin to create user flows and workshop templates.

Wireframing

Gone are the days when whiteboarding and higher-fidelity design were done in distinct apps. You can easily create interactive wireframes to test your design and go through user flows with wireframe UI kits. When you’re ready to build out the design, all you have to do is update the components you’ve built along the way.

Designing a User Interface

Adobe XD gives UI designers the tools they need to execute their best work, from fine-tuning interface details like iconography and typography to striking the perfect layout balance. Assets can be easily taken in and placed in Adobe XD thanks to connectivity with other Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. Use the built-in guides in XD to achieve placement precision and fine-tune your design.

Prototyping

From within Adobe XD, go from a static design to a lifelike prototype. It takes less effort to produce a prototype design that consumers can explore and engage with thanks to advanced capabilities like Auto-Animate and Voice, resulting in better user testing experiences.