So Adobe XD CC is out, what now?
I wrote an article about my experience so far with Adobe XD while it was in beta more than a year ago.
I listed a lot of negative things about XD and I finished it with something that turned out to be false.
I love this product. I use it day to day for almost every design related work for the past year. I’ve got more than 70 design projects so far done on it or about one every week or so on average.
So what is this article for?
As much as Adobe XD is a great product and trust me, it’s the only one I use day to day, it still lacks some core features for it’s v1.0.
If we have to outline the two goals of Adobe XD they would be:
- It must perform extremely well
- It must be easy to work with and allow fast prototyping
So far, both are implemented very well. The program launches blazingly fast and it’s extremely easy to start work and produce great results with it’s limited set of tools.
I like that it has only a rectangle, a circle, line, text, pen tool and text editing. That’s it. Nothing more.
Yes, each tool has various settings, but in general things are simple. Everything fits in a narrow bar to the left. There are countless tutorials on how to work with Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity designer, Corel draw, Sketch, you name it.
But there’s no need to make tutorials about XD, everything is easy to understand right away.
So what is bad about it?
Sadly, this can also backfire. There are many very small features that are lacking from the complete experience of the app.
Right now there are over 1000 requests in the Adobe XD features requests site.
Most of them sound very intuitive and no brainers, but they are not in XD. Simple things like setting underline or uppercase to text boxes or reordering assets should be in there.
Or how about exporting JPG files? Large images are best at compressed JPG format. Right now I have to export as PNG, convert to JPG and then compress them into smaller files to save space.
Adobe launched XD CC as v1.0 yesterday. Now it’s paid product and maybe less new people will try it out because of that, but it’s understandable.
On the positive note, most of the often requested features from the community are said to be on the pipeline and released in the future.
👍 to the Adobe team for being active among it’s user base!
My thoughts about its future
Maybe this is the hardest part in the future of XD. What is the limit of adding new features? If every feature requested is applied to the product (as long as it does seem helpful) it will turn out into Sketch after a few years. And it shouldn’t. It’s different it it’s core.
Honestly, I don’t like Sketch because it feels slow and overwhelming. It’s design even feels heavy and in the way.
It pans slower, it zooms slower, there are too many tools and it just doesn’t look good to me (personal opinion here) even though it provide just so many more tools that can speed up work and make much more complex designs.
What I want for XD is to keep it’s feel in the future. I want it to be fast and very easy to use three years from now and even if I stopped using it and picked up after three years, I would be able to do the exact same things with the same speed as now.
Where would the new features be? Imagine Vim… yes.
Features can be something to toggle, arrange, add on the toolbar, install as a plugin or anything, it’s core experience should remain the same as it was from day one.
If you have to explain a feature to the user, then it’s not yet ready to implement. Take for example repeat grid.
All I have to do is hit cmd+r. Then I see green outline and two handlebars. They just make me want to drag them. That’s it, no need to explain it, I can jump and use it right away.
Lastly, my point of view on comparing different tools:
There are fights between users of different operation systems, different gaming consoles, different software and so on.
let’s take three laptops — one with Windows, one with Linux and one with Mac. Put them in a box…
…
Nothing? Yes, because they just sit there and there’s no one to use them. So what is different is the user. It depends on the needs of the person using the machine/software.
So there will always be people that bash one or another product and very often they arguments can be valid for their usage, but the product’s purpose might be different.
For me Adobe XD does exactly what I want even if it lacks some features that would make it even better for me. I hope that the Adobe team can find the best balance between ease of use and amount of core features that can make the work of most designers easier.
I can’t wait to see how the app progresses in the future and mostly I hope for regular updates and a continuation of the community involvement of Adobe XD’s development/community relations team.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the current state of Adobe XD and it’s future! Post your comment/article below or catch me up on twitter https://twitter.com/xavortm
